Cats and Dogs (episode #1614)

You’re listening to a special edition of A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Today we’re looking back at some of our favorite conversations about cats and dogs, and a few other animals besides.

Cats and dogs prowl around inside some interesting English words.

For example, the adjective chatoyant.

That’s C-H-A-T-O-Y-A-N-T.

It describes something that’s shimmering like a cat’s eyes, like you might talk about a chatoyant gemstone.

And chatoyant comes from the French word for cat.

And don’t forget about sleuth.

You and I do a lot of sleuthing.

And sleuth is a shortening of the word sleuth-hound.

In the 15th century, the name sleuth-hound applied to a bloodhound with a strong sense of smell.

But it wasn’t until the 19th century that sleuth came to apply to a private investigator instead of to the dog.

And then there are all those funny words that our own pets inspire.

Emily called from San Diego to talk about one of them, the word blep.

Blep.

Bleps are the internet name for when a cat, usually it kind of counts with dogs, they do it all the time,

Leaves their tongue out and it’s just kind of the like comic book caption for this expression or

Action of theirs blip blep right a blep yeah blep and it’s kind of the same family the more like

Commonly known one is a boop when whether you touch an animal’s nose and you go boop or they

Touch something else with their nose I feel like that has started yeah I’ve seen it more in the

Real world you know booping yeah you boop a snoot yeah it’s not that it makes the sound boop but

It’s kind of the action itself.

And so blep is the name

For the tongue being left out.

If you Google these things, you’ll see them all kind of

Associated.

So are these onomatopoeia?

Is that what they would count as?

Some of them maybe. Certainly the

Melm, M-L-E-M, when they do kind of a

Gentle licking, right?

Yeah, the licking, the melm-ing,

That’s the third trio of these

Siblings of animals. Like if a cat has

Food on his whiskers and he does the little

Gentle lick to get off, that’s a melm-ing.

How are you spelling that? M-L-E-M?

M-L-E-M, yeah.

It’s hard to say. I usually see it in writing.

M-L-E-M, and then blep. I love those, all those.

In my house, we agree that all dog snoots must be booped.

If they’ll let you boop them, you have to boop a snoot.

The boop.

So how long before these are in the dictionary?

What’s the barrier they cross over?

I don’t think it’ll be long in the scheme of language, maybe 10 years or so if they last.

I first noticed this kind of cutesy language becoming a little more regularized.

Because let’s face it, we all have cutesy language with our animals.

We have all these words that we use in the house for our relationships with our pets.

And sometimes we have our, you know, some pets in some houses have like 10 or 15 nicknames.

And they’re all kind of cutesy and fun and that sort of thing.

But the regularization of this kind of language first came to my attention for what it’s worth in 2005 with the Cute Overload website.

Do you remember this website?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I love that website.

It’s still up, but they stopped posting new content a couple of years ago, and it’s cute animals.

And they had all kinds of language.

One of my favorite was talking about tocks, short for buttocks.

So the tocks of a little animal.

It’s cute little fuzzy behind, right?

And I think that’s where I first learned toe beans for the little pink.

Oh, yeah, the peas.

The bottoms of little cats’ feet.

Yeah, and if you go to the Cute Overload website, they still have a glossary there

That has a lot of this really adorable language,

Like all the different ways you can go aww and spell it.

So all these different spelling, like HN, for example.

There’s another vector that other people have discovered,

And I think they’re right,

As a source of really, really popularizing this language.

And that vector is the Dogspotting Facebook group.

And so there’s something like 800,000 members to this group.

And basically what they do is post pictures of animals

That they’ve come across or had an interaction with

Or their own pets, and a lot of the languages are just adorable.

And then the other vector is the We Rate Dogs Twitter feed.

Oh, yeah.

Where every dog is rated on a scale of 1 to 10,

And they’re always like 13 out of 10.

Wood pets, and 12 out of 10 is super adorable.

Emily, you sound like you go to all these websites.

Yeah, yeah, these are all pretty classic Internet spaces.

It’s funny, because it feels like everyone kind of came to these same conclusions,

Like, independently.

Like, the amount of people I know who call their pets bean, which I think probably did come from the little toe beans,

It’s all part of the same, you know, colloquial phrase for a cute little thing as a bean.

And, you know, the booping and the blooming and the blepping.

Like, I saw it from so many different corners of the Internet, kind of like independently gaining traction

And all these different types of people.

They just seem right.

Yeah, it’s sort of like the Internet is the dog park for people with cats, right?

It’s not just cats. It’s dogs and birds.

Burbs. Not birds.

Burbs.

Burbs, yeah.

Dogs and burbs and squirbs.

That’s squirrels in my house.

And any cute animal, really.

And Grant, we didn’t even talk about doggos and puppers and pupperinos.

And fluffers and floofs and woofers and boofers and blops.

I like blops. That’s just a little blep.

Just a little blep.

And spluting.

That’s when your dog or cat lies on its tummy with its limbs outstretched, or maybe a squirrel, its splutes.

We’ve also talked about the many terms in the Dictionary of American Regional English that involve cats.

Remember when I asked if you knew what cat beer is?

Cat beer?

Cat beer.

Like beer for cats.

No, I don’t remember that.

Remind me?

Well, here’s what you said.

What’s cat beer?

Cat beer is a term that you hear in the north, at least in Minnesota and in Vermont, that means milk.

Oh, how about that?

Cat beer.

Cat beer.

What about cat hair?

It’s not the cat hair.

No.

Actual cat hair.

It’s something else.

No.

Would this be, I don’t know, cat hair?

You might say of somebody, he’s certainly got the cat hair.

Whiskers on your face from not shaving?

I don’t know.

Money.

That’s money?

They had citations from Oklahoma and Ohio.

Cat hair.

Yeah.

To have the cat hairs to have money.

Okay.

Yeah.

How about that?

Sure.

And one more cat face.

Oh, sure.

I know that one.

Yeah.

We have terms for that.

We have citations for that on our website.

Oh, okay.

So these are fruits, vegetables, especially tomatoes, where they kind of grow with some

Weird splits in the side, like the way the cat’s mouth is shaped.

Mm—

Yeah.

Mm—

Yeah.

Or the way that a tomato looks when you pull it off the vine.

You know, that part where it connected to the vine.

It looks like the little triangular shape of a cat’s face.

Yeah.

There are actually a couple of other definitions for cat face.

One is a scar or not on a tree.

Oh, yeah.

But the one that I really like is the one that’s used largely in the African-American community in the South.

And it means a wrinkle or pucker in clothing when ironed too dry.

In fact, Maya Angelou wrote in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,

I had to iron seven-star shirts and not leave a cat’s face anywhere.

Oh, how about that?

We’ll be back with more in a moment.

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Thank you.

This week I came across the expression Barker’s Egg.

Do you know this term, Barker’s Egg?

Oh, this has got a flavor to it.

Does it?

This has a slangy flavor to it.

It does have a slangy flavor to it.

Barker’s egg.

This is saying it’s a dog-related thing.

That’s right.

Barker.

Yeah.

When I first saw it, I thought Barker’s egg, well, that must be from a specific bird. You know, Barker is such and such, and the egg is a special egg. But no, a Barker’s egg in Australia is, you know, when you’re taking your dog for a walk and you have that little plastic bag and you pick up the Barker’s egg off the ground.

Oh, I see.

It’s the doggy do that you pick up, right?

That’s right.

And we are picking up right where we left off in this special edition of A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

Today we’re looking back at some calls about critters. One of our youngest listeners asked about a saying that you may have wondered about too.

My name’s Edie from Texas. And can you please tell me where the phrase, it’s raining cats and dogs, comes from?

Where the phrase, it’s raining cats and dogs, come from, where did you come across that that made you think about this?

It was a rainy day, and I was watching the rain come down, and I asked my dad, what does the phrase, it’s raining cats and dogs, mean? And he said he did it now.

Is that something that the two of you say together? Do you both say, it’s raining cats and dogs, or did you hear it somewhere else?

I just said it.

Okay.

And, Evie, do you have a dog yourself?

Yeah.

He’s more like a bodyguard to me because he wants to make sure I’m safe at times.

And what’s your dog’s name, Evie?

Penny like the coin.

Penny like the coin.

That’s nice.

So, raining cats and dogs, Martha. What do we know about that?

Well, you’ve never seen cats and dogs falling out of the clouds, have you, Evie?

No.

Yeah, yeah.

So, that’s what we call a figure of speech. It’s just an imaginary thing. And the idea of raining cats and dogs just refers to the idea that when the rain is really, really coming down, it’s really noisy and really loud, right?

Yeah.

I mean, if you can imagine cats and dogs all flying down from the clouds, it would get really, really noisy, right? Barking and howling and yowling and meowing and a little fighting on the way down.

Yeah.

A bit hissing.

Yeah, some hissing for sure.

Yeah.

And the reason that I think it has to do with the noise of rain is because if you look at cultures around the world in different countries, they also talk about something that’s really noisy, like in Greece, for example, they don’t say the rain is coming down hard. They say it’s raining chair legs. Can you imagine if a bunch of chair legs were coming down out of the sky? That would be really noisy, too.

Or in South Africa, they say, it’s raining grandmothers with clubs.

What?

Right? It’s really crazy. So like grannies coming down, thumping the ground with clubs.

Yeah. And in Poland, they say it’s raining frogs, which would also be really noisy.

Sure.

And in Colombia, they have a Spanish phrase that goes, it’s raining even husbands. Or it translates as, it’s raining even husbands. It’s raining men. Hallelujah.

Yeah.

Yeah, so the English version of that is it’s raining cats and dogs, which is a very, very noisy situation.

Okay.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Thank you for calling, Evie. We really appreciate it.

You’re welcome.

All right, take care.

Thanks, Evie.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Bye.

So we have to debunk.

Yes, let’s debunk.

The famous email that floats around that I’ve now been getting for over 20 years.

Yep.

Raining cats and dogs does not come from sodden thatched roofs that had animals on them and that would fall through when it rained a lot.

Thank you.

Please do not send us that email. It does not come from that. It has never come from that. There’s no evidence. That’s no. No, it doesn’t. There’s nobody in the history of studying language that believes that.

Yep, that email about life in the 1500s continues to rear its ugly head. But we’re here to say, don’t fall for it, please.

Now, here’s a conversation we had about the linguistic paw prints in another phrase.

My name is William. I’m from Austin, Texas. And I think I got a good one for you guys.

All right. Let’s hear it. Lay it out.

Okay. So I work in the film industry here. And I was on a set a couple months ago. And it was after a really long day and we were all chilling out afterwards. And I sat down and I said, oh, man, my dogs are barking. And I started taking my shoes off. But everyone looked at me like they didn’t know what I was talking about. And I’ve grown up in Texas my whole life, and I’ve said my dog’s barking, which means your feet hurt as far as I know. But I don’t know why that is a phrase or a saying, and I was hoping you guys could shed some light on that.

A little bit. A little bit of light we can shed on dogs.

Okay. All right. So we’ve got to separate the two words, the dogs and the barking, because the dogs came first as early as 1913, dogs sling for feet. And it actually popped up in the work of a well-known cartoonist called Tad, or T.A. Dorgan, who did cartoons for some New York newspapers. And he’s got various connections to various etymological histories. He’s apparently widely read and widely appreciated and had a great sense of humor. But the first use that I know of was in one of his cartoons. And then it caught on. It starts to pop up in jazz songs and ragtime songs again and again and again. And even now, I use it. I used it just last week, much to the mystification of one of my friends.

Did you?

Yeah.

I know the feeling. Yeah, they put their feet up, and I’m like, oh, I’ve got to arrest those dogs.

And they’re like, what?

They’re just giving me that blind.

Yeah, one guy was like, why are your dogs barking?

Like, I don’t actually have dogs.

It’s my feet, you guys.

And so after the slang term for dog existed, slang for feet, people made the extra joke of their dogs barking, meaning that they were begging for some attention.

-huh.

Right?

That’s it, man. That is no more complicated than that.

Although I should point out what’s really interesting.

It did for a while there, and it’s less common now.

It also took on the meaning of shoes, not just the feet, but dogs could mean your shoes.

Gotcha.

And you know, the makers of Hush Puppy Shoes took this idea and ran with it.

Back in the 1950s, they started advertising that their soft, casual footwear would quiet those barking dogs at the end of your legs.

Another linguistic mystery solved.

Speaking of solving mysteries, you’ll want to stick around because in a few minutes, we’ll hear from our friend Will Shorts.

You know Will as crossword editor of the New York Times and puzzle master on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday.

He’s promised us a quiz about a whole menagerie of animals.

More in a moment, but first, please help us keep bringing you more episodes with a gift to the nonprofit that produces A Way with Words.

Go to waywordradio.org.

Look for the red heart on the donate button.

And give what you can. Thank you.

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett, and we’re joined by a special guest.

It’s Will Shorts, crossword editor of the New York Times and puzzle master of NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday.

Hi, Will.

Hey there, Grant. Nice to talk to you and Martha again.

What have you got for us, Will?

Well, I understand you have an animal-related show, so I have brought an animal-related puzzle.

If somehow you could cross a chipmunk and a monkey, an offspring could be called by the portmanteau chipmonkey.

And similarly, if you crossed a cockatoo with a toucan, you’d get a cockatoo can.

Cockatoo can.

Okay.

So I’m going to describe some other animals whose names overlap phonetically.

You tell me what their offspring should be called.

Okay.

We’re were going way beyond Labradoodles here.

Here’s your first one.

An Australian animal that hops.

And a male chicken.

A kangarooster.

You got it.

Number two, a great ape of Africa.

And a wild horse with black and white stripes.

White stripes?

I think they just have white stripes, don’t they?

Oh, okay.

I think I have it.

Go.

Chimpanzebra?

Chimpanzebras, right?

How about a heavy African animal that spends a lot of time in the water?

And a bivalve mollusk.

Hippopotamus.

You got it.

How about a relative of a kangaroo crossed with an animal that builds dams?

A wall of beaver.

Now that’s what I want to see.

I want to see all of these.

A small desert rodent that can walk on two legs crossed with a large snake that coils around its prey.

And that’s a two-word thing.

That would be a Jeroboam constrictor.

A Jeroboam constrictor is right.

How about a one-humped camel crossed with a farm animal that gives milk?

That’s two words.

A tramadary cow.

You got it.

I guess they both could give milk.

And your last one, an Australian animal with a duck bill crossed with an affectionate term for a feline pet.

Platt a pussy.

Oh, a platt a pussycat is right.

Platt a pussycat.

Yeah, that’s one of the villains, I think, from a Bond film.

Yes.

Okay.

Congratulations.

Well, thank you, Will.

I love this.

These are adorable.

I can’t wait to go to that zoo.

We appreciate you coming out today and doing an animal-themed quiz with us.

It was a lot of fun.

Anytime.

It’s always good to talk with Will.

And you know, it’s really quite something that he began editing the New York Times crossword puzzle back in 1993.

Grant, that means he’s on a 30-year run.

Will might just be the greatest of all time.

Well, speaking of goats, and I mean goats with wiggly tails and very successful people.

Speaking of goats, we heard from Pam in Eureka, California, who asked about a phrase involving the barnyard creatures.

My mother and grandmother, when they would go into a dark room or it was really dark at night,

They would say it was as dark as the inside of a goat.

And that struck me as rather odd, because presumably neither lady had ever been inside a goat.

But I just considered, well, maybe it was just some little family weirdity.

But then I read an historic novel set in New Orleans in like the early 19th century,

And there was a character in the story that said something was as dark as the inside of a cow.

And I thought, well, this is really weird.

Where are these people coming with this idea of inside of large ruminants?

There should be in darkness.

I wondered about it for years and finally decided, well, you’re the guys that would know,

So I’d just give you a call and see what you say.

You know what, Pam? Neither of us has been inside of a ruminant.

No.

You thought we would know.

Although it reminds me of the Groucho Marx quote. Do you know that one?

No. Which one?

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.

Oh, right. Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Inside a goat, too. Right.

So you were saying that you read the dark is the inside of a cow phrase in a book from the early 19th century?

Well, no, it was a historic novel set in the early 19th century in New Orleans.

And some character says this about, you know, the inside of a cow.

That’s really very like what mom and grandma used to say.

Yeah, well, it goes back even farther than that.

Dark as the inside of a cow has been around since at least Mark Twain.

Oh, really?

Yeah, he used that phrase in Roughing It in 1871.

And in Innocence Abroad.

-huh.

Yeah.

And you can sort of infer what the idea is.

I mean, if you’re in there with no light bulbs, it’s going to be dark, right?

And there are lots of different variations of it.

I haven’t heard the inside of a goat one before.

Have you, Grant?

No, but I’ve heard whale.

But there are lots of other ones, like inside of a whale, inside of a cat, inside of a black cat, inside of a sack, inside of a needle.

Joyce Carey wrote about something as dark as the inside of a cabinet minister, which I really like.

I don’t want to be in there either, no.

I’ve seen a few magician’s hat, coal scuttle, the devil’s waistcoat pocket.

Wow.

All dark.

But goat?

You haven’t heard goat?

Goat, I don’t know that one, no.

So that may be a family weirdity.

I like that word, weirdity.

Weirdity may be a family weirdity as well.

I’m not sure.

Well, is there any kind of regional thing about it?

I know that my mother’s family, some of it came from the South.

I don’t know my genealogy very well.

I’m not aware of it being regional.

It’s not regional.

It’s across all of the English-speaking world.

You’ll find it popping up anywhere English has spoken over the last 200-plus years.

Varieties of dark as the inside of an X.

Well, maybe my relatives couldn’t afford cows, so they just had goats.

Goats are great.

I like goats.

Pam, thank you for sharing this family phrase.

I’ll keep my eyes open and see if what other animals have had their interiors invaded by this phrase.

Yeah, let us know if you hear of any more, okay?

Okay, bye.

There’s lots more to come, but first, there’s nothing we’d like better than to fill your podcast feed with lots more episodes of A Way with Words.

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Go to waywordradio.org, click on the donate button with the red heart, and give what you can to help us keep bringing you shows that are as entertaining as they are educational.

Thank you.

You’re listening to a special edition of A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

We’ve been talking about animals lurking inside the words and phrases that we use to communicate with each other.

We also had a great conversation about the language a listener uses when she communicates with animals.

Hi, this is Katie calling from Fairbanks, Alaska.

Hello, Katie. Welcome.

What can we do for you, Katie?

What’s happening in Fairbanks?

Yeah, well, as you guys may or may not know, Fairbanks is one of the dog-mushing hubs of the world.

And I’m actually a dog-musher here in Fairbanks.

What?

Yeah, I run dog sledding tours with my husband, and then my husband is also running the Iditarod, the 1,000-mile race that starts in just a couple weeks.

Wow, that’s amazing.

1,000 miles.

Yeah, so I have a dog mushing question for you this morning.

Wait, you have one for us?

Yeah, well, it’s a dog mushing terminology question.

Okay.

So when we direct the dogs where and how to turn, we use our voices.

So we tell them G to go right and haw to go left.

And it’s my understanding that those words go back to, I think, like horse driving and mule driving commands that I’m assuming were at least used around sort of the turn of the century and like Wild West gold rush time period in the lower 48 states.

And I think that that’s when the terminology was brought here to Alaska and started to be used by dog mushers here, again, around the turn of the century, early 1900s.

But I’m curious why those words and where they came from kind of before the horse driving and the mule driving.

Wow, that’s amazing.

So just to recap here, G is left and haw is right.

I think it’s the other way around.

Opposite, okay.

Haw is right and G is left.

The reason I asked you is one of my colleagues has done a little bit of work.

It’s been a couple decades on the modern understanding of these words, which were very well known when we were a more agrarian society.

When you had a mule team or an oxen team to help you work the fields or horses to go to town with or what have you.

And it turns out in the modern day, most people know that G and Haw are directions to animals, but they don’t remember which is which.

Which is left, except in dog mushing, which is really interesting.

Yeah.

So Haw is left and G is right.

Yeah.

And so they have separate lives as words, and they only kind of come together as a pair in the last 150 years or so.

G is the much older one, goes back to at least the 1600s.

You can find it in a ton of old dialect dictionaries throughout the United Kingdom.

And what’s really interesting, it doesn’t always mean the same thing in every place.

So in some cases, it just means go, or it means go forward, or it means go fast.

And then, of course, later in the United States, it gets really specific and just means go right or turn right or veer right.

Yeah.

Pretty cool, right?

So cool.

Yeah.

And it’s probably, what’s even more interesting to me is that there are all these other terms that sound like G, like G up or giddy up or get up, that all kind of mean to go or get the speed on.

But they’re all later than G.

They’re all much newer, which means they might be influenced by it, but they aren’t the source of the word G, meaning go or go right.

Right, okay.

And what we don’t have for that or for Hall, we don’t know the true origin because these are interjections.

Interjections are notoriously difficult to source when you’re doing word histories or etymologies.

These are words that probably exist for centuries or even longer in the language before somebody decides to write them down because they’re in the beginning of kind of really making dictionaries or collections of word lists.

Interjections get kind of short shrift because they seem so ordinary and they seem kind of non-lexical.

And so people don’t really bother to write them down until they become a little more obsessive and a little more completist later.

Well, what strikes me about these two is that the vowel sounds are so different that I’m guessing that even if you’re in a snowstorm or the wind’s blowing really hard, you might not hear the initial sound, but you’re going to hear the E or the R.

Is that what you find, Katie?

Yeah, I think that’s exactly right.

So when we give tours, I’m usually having this conversation with people about G and Ha, and I’ll be directing the dogs with my voice during the tourism, people will often say to me, gosh, you know, you don’t say that very loud.

People expect that we really need to like yell at the dogs in order for them to hear us.

Because mostly when we give those commands, we’re talking to the dogs that are in the very front of the team, the leaders.

And so people think we really need to yell in order for them to be able to hear us.

But, you know, I think, well, A, dogs have a great sense of hearing, but also like because they sound so different, I think they really only need to get, you know, kind of a sense of what I’m saying, a little piece of it, and they can easily get like, okay, yeah, she’s saying, you know, this way or that way.

Outstanding.

That’s super cool.

While we’re talking, do you know the origin of the word mush?

I think so, but I could be wrong.

I believe it comes from marché, which is French, I think, to walk or to march or to move.

Right, exactly, exactly.

I would be interested to know how that word migrated around the world, because the French aren’t necessarily known for their dog mushing prowess, you know, at least in France.

So I think that it comes maybe from French Canadians and natives in that part of Canada who were mushing at some point.

And I don’t even know what century that would be, maybe 1800s?

Earlier than that.

Yeah, it goes back to the French tradition in what is now Canada.

Think about a time before there were really borders between the countries, or the borders didn’t matter very much.

Think about the fur trapper era or the casual exploring era where a guy just wanted to go see the country and he’d take off, and he would learn this tradition of working with dogs in this way from the native people.

And then the French jargon is kind of applied to this old historic way of getting around.

Yeah, cool.

We actually never say it to the dogs.

So it’s a word that we use, like when we’re talking about mushing, when we’re describing what we’re doing.

But it’s not a command, which a lot of people are surprised to hear.

I don’t ever tell the dogs to mush.

And I think it’s because the word kind of like what we were just talking about, the word sounds like mush.

Like, I think it’s hard for them to hear, you know.

It’s different than G and H, which are very easy for them to hear.

So what do you say when you want them to get going?

It’s a two-part command.

The first thing that we do is basically tell them to get ready.

So we say ready, and then we say all right.

And all right is their command for, like, moving forward.

Different mushers will say hike.

I’ve heard hike as well, but I think, again, all right with the T and hike with the K is nice and easy for them to hear.

Year.

Now, I have to point out that Katie here is Katie Jo Dieter.

And since our conversation back in 2018, she and her team have competed twice in the Iditarod.

Most recently, they came in 16th.

And that race is almost a thousand miles through some of the toughest terrain in Alaska.

Wow.

Congratulations, Katie Jo.

That is amazing.

And we should add that Katie Jo told us one more important thing about mushing.

Katie, one last question, although I could talk to you all day.

How do you get them to stop?

Oh, we have brakes on the sled.

Wait, you just surprised them?

You just turned the sled off?

We do say woe, but we say woe as we’re applying that brake.

And I’ve gotten them to stop using just the word before, but you typically do need the brake.

And that’s why the number one rule in mushing is to never, ever let go of your sled.

Because if you fall off, you know, you tip over and let go, they’re just going to keep going.

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