Gee and Haw in Dog-Sledding

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

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?

Cool.

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.

A thousand miles.

Yeah, 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 directions to animals, but they don’t remember which is which.

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

Yeah.

So ha 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 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.

And 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 tours.

And 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 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 Haw, 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.

Would your dogs obey anyone’s voice but yours?

Yes and no.

My mom and I were just having that conversation last night.

She’s here visiting, and she was driving her own little five-dog team, and she was getting frustrated because I wouldn’t listen to her commands.

And she knows the words, but I think a lot of it has to do with how you say it.

You know, so the tone and the authority and the inflection is really big.

You know, so my husband and I will say our commands almost exactly the same.

I learned how to mush from him.

And so I think definitely the dogs do know the words, but there also needs to be a similarity in tone and inflection.

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

Seriously.

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 break.

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.

We don’t have a way to bring them back.

They are enthusiastic.

They are in it.

And we would love to see pictures of the dogs.

Yeah.

You can check them all out on our website.

The name of our kennel is blacksprucedogsledding.com.

And I have little pictures of everybody up on their website along with little biographies.

Oh, that’s nice.

Biographies.

BlackspruceDogSledding.com.

Okay, we’ll put a link on our website.

Katie, thank you so much.

This was so informational and so enlightening and so lovely.

Yeah, we learned a lot.

Really appreciate it.

Good luck.

It was great to talk to you guys.

Thank you so much.

Take care now.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

What language are you preoccupied with these days?

Call us, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.