A-M u s i n g s: Bellwethers

Musings are thoughts, the thoughtful kind. For the purpose of these articles, a-musings are thoughts that might amuse, entertain and even enlighten.

Whether you believe it or not, a wether gets wet in wet weather: Three words with three different spellings and meanings, but all with the same pronunciation. English is a funny old language, don’t you think?

For years I thought the word was bellweather, fine weather you know, follow this lead and all would be well; the sun would shine every day, and the world would be full of happiness. How wrong can a man be, or woman for that matter? Then I read this story.

An old shepherd suffered a stroke and his doctor, in order to test his mental faculties, asked, “Suppose you had a pen with 100 sheep in it and one got out. How many sheep would you have left in the pen?”

“None,” replied the old shepherd.

“Well, no,” said the doctor, “that’s not quite right. If you had 100, and you lost one, how can that make none?”

“Look, young fella,” said the old farmer, “you may know brains but you don’t know sheep. If one of those damn things goes, they all go,” which brings us back to today’s word, bellwether.

Well, not quite. When I wrote pen I was not thinking of a writing instrument but a place for confining sheep; funny language, English.

Bellwether is a word that has almost lost its original meaning. The term wether originated in 9th century Old English, and referred to a castrated male sheep, a castrated ram. Four hundred years later, by the 13th century, the term bellwether had become synonymous with wether, and both referred again to the poor, castrated male sheep, but the prefix bell denoted the specific role this neutered sheep played for both shepherds and their sheep.

In order to track flocks of sheep, a bell was attached to the wether, giving rise to the term bellwether. The reason a bell was put on the wether, rather than other sheep, was because of his status as the flock eunuch. Bellwethers were docile and easily controlled. Because of the ease with which they could be controlled, they were used to lead the flock, and the sound of the bell around their necks kept the sheep’s owners apprised of their location.

In quite different circumstances, because of their emasculation, bellwethers were commonly used to lead their fellow sheep to slaughter. However, the bellwether never was killed: his skills, such as they were, proved too valuable to lose. Thus, early sheep slaughterhouses developed a “bellwether gate” which was used to separate the bellwether sheep from the rest of the flock once he had led them into the slaughterhouse’s intake chute. The saved bellwether was introduced to a new flock and the process was repeated. In this particular case, a lack of testicular fortitude was quite advantageous.

Like the word’s origin, the term has been neutered with time, and now refers only to leading indicators of group activity. Today, though, the word’s etymology remains apt. A bellwether is someone or something that leads others or shows what will happen in the future. For example, ‘She is a bellwether of the fashion industry’, meaning where she leads, others will follow. But remember this little tongue twister:

Whether the weather is cold,

Or whether the weather is hot,

A wether will weather the weather,

Whatever the weather,

Whether the wether likes the weather or not.

A homophone has nothing to do with gay telephones. A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same, or almost the same, as another word but differs in meaning or spelling. The two words may be spelled the same, such as rose (flower) and rose (past tense of “rise”), or differently, such as carat, caret and carrot, or to, two and too. How about these? Bail, bale; bait, bate; baize, bays; bald, bawled; ball, bawl; band, banned; bard, barred; bare, bear; bark, barque; baron, barren; base, bass. The list never ends.