Canine Turns of Phrase Those of us lucky enough to share our lives with dogs may be more sensitive than most to canine turns of phrase. For dog-lovers, a page that’s dog-eared instantly calls to mind the pleasure of scratching behind a floppy one. If someone warns us that a path is about to dogleg, we have no trouble imagining the crooked shape that lies ahead. And watching puppies chase each other around to the point of exhaustion gives a whole new meaning to the expression dog-tired. But dogs also go padding about the English language in other surprising places, for they inhabit the histories of several familiar words. To find these hidden images of dogs, however, takes a little etymological sleuthing. The word sleuth, in fact, is a perfect example: A few hundred years ago, speakers of English used the term sleuthhound as a synonym for "Bloodhound" -- a breed distinguished, of course, by its keen sense of smell and intense focus when sniffing out quarry. By the 1800s, people had begun shortening sleuthhound to sleuth, and applying it to equally dogged human investigators. (The sleuth in sleuthhound, by the way, derives from a similar-sounding Old Norse term that means "track" or "trail.") When we tell someone we plan to muse about a topic, we’re also invoking canine behavior. As a noun, the word muse means "a source of inspiration" -- an allusion to the nine Muses of Greek mythology, who presided over the arts. But the verb to muse apparently comes from a completely different source. Etymologists suspect that this type of muse arose from the Middle French verb muser (a relative of the English muzzle), which originally specified the way a hunting dog stares distractedly and sniffs when unsure about a scent. Over time, this sense of "staring while lost in thought" came to be applied to the way humans ponder as well. The name of the bird we call a canary also has canine roots: Around 40 B.C., explorers landing on an island off the coast of northwest Africa were struck by the number of large dogs roaming there. According to the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, the explorers therefore called the island Canaria, from the Latin word canis, or "dog." Today this archipelago is known as the Canary Islands -- and it was only later that the brilliant native songbirds acquired their name. Not everyone appreciates dogs, though -- as the roots of our word feisty clearly demonstrate. The linguistic forerunner of feisty is the word feist, an antiquated English term for "a small, mixed-breed dog." The noun feist, in turn, arose from an even older verb, to fist, which literally means "to pass gas." In Merrie Olde England, in fact, it was once common to express contempt for a dog considered annoying, referring to it as a fisting hound or a fisting cur. Eventually, non-dog-lovers shortened these phrases to either fist or feist -- epithets still occasionally applied in parts of the United States today to small, mixed-breed dogs, particularly if they’re belligerent or persistent barkers. As often happens when words are passed down from one generation to the next, the term feisty came to be applied more generally, not just to gassy little dogs, but to anyone similarly spunky or pugnacious. A happier image -- one that every doggy devotee knows well -- lies at the heart of our word adulation: When the ancient Romans used the verb adulari, they were alluding specifically to the enthusiastic wiggle of an eager-to-please puppy. In its earliest sense, the Latin word adulari meant "to fawn over someone like a dog wagging its tail." Over time, this word’s meaning expanded to include the more general sense of "to flatter," and by the 18th century, its English descendant, adulation, had come to mean "effusive admiration or praise." Ralph Waldo Emerson once observed: "The etymologist finds the deadest word to have once been a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry." Indeed, when you open up a dictionary and dust off those fossils, you just might uncover the tracks of a dog or detect a faint trace of canine behavior. In any case, the next time you and yours are out for a walk, it’s something worth musing about. From Dog Days and Dandelions by Martha Barnette, courtesy of The Bark. Woof!