The Australian Berwick Highland Gathering 2010

As I mentioned in my previous post, Penny and I went to a flyball competition today. It was at the Berwick Highland Gathering here in Victoria in Australia.

My mum was Scottish and this led to a little problem with my running of Penny. If the massed pipe bands played my mum's favorite old songs, I started to cry. At one stage I was yelling encouragement to Penny in a croaky voice with tears dripping off the end of my nose. But probably no-one noticed. Thank goodness for sunglasses.

My mum would have loved to have been there!



At one stage as I wandered around, I had a chat with a woman selling Celtic pottery and she told me that dogs play a special part in Celtic mythology. That got me thinking, and when I arrived home I looked in 'Celtic Myth and Legend - An A-Z of People and Places. Because it's arranged alphabetically rather than in themes, I couldn't simply look for 'dogs', but I did read the entry on Cu Chulainn, whom the author refers to as 'the best known and greatest of all the Irish heroes'. Having killed Culann's dog, the hero, then known as Sedanta, offered to become Culann's guard dog, and this act earned him his new name, which means 'Culann's Hound'.

I've wondered sometimes why the words 'hound' and 'dog' don't mean exactly the same thing in English, and I wrote a post about this some time ago on my other blog.

why is a dog a dog and not a hound?

When I was browsing the archives of A Word a Day, one of my favorite language sites, one that sends me an interesting mail each day, I came across this snippet from 2004:

Our seven-year-old daughter Ananya has developed an interest in etymology. Often she'll interrupt her play in the backyard and peek in my downstairs study to ask about whatever word comes to her mind. Some time back she barged in with, "So how did the word dog came about?" I explained to her that the word dog came from Middle English dogge which came from Old English docga. Satisfied, she went back to her play.

I had completely forgotten about it when a few days later I overheard her talking to her grandmother on the phone, "Amma, we got a dogga." I was puzzled and later asked why she said dogga instead of dog. She patiently explained, "You know, Amma is old. That's why I used Old English with her."

That got me to wondering about all the things we call our canine friends: Dog - well, I'll accept the explanation above, for that one. But what about the word hound?

But I guess this is not a subject for this blog, which after all is supposed to be about Penny, and she doesn't care what we call her, as long as we call her for dinner. (Couldn't resist that terrible joke.)

I'll save my thoughts about these doggy words for my other blog, Words All Around.