“Hassling” for a Dog’s Panting Goes Back to a 19th-Century Word

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Maggie.

I’m calling from Washington DC.

Hi, Maggie.

Welcome to the program.

What’s up?

Thank you so much.

I’m calling because I was just thinking of my best friend, from college who’s from Eastern North Carolina, and something that she used to say whenever we would see, like, a dog, you know, in the hot North Carolina summers or whatever, the dog would be, like, panting pretty much.

And she would say something like, oh that dog’s hassling in her southern accent and I always wondered what she meant by that.

So one day I asked her and she said oh that’s just what we say for panting and I was like what are you talking about?

Who’s we?

She’s like, I don’t know, I’m our family.

So sure enough we called up her brother who’s a vet and we’re like, hey, Wes, what do you call a dog that is, you know, its tongue is hanging out and it’s really hot?

He was like, oh, well that means the dog is panting or he said if you want the southern term the dog is hassling.

So it wasn’t just Hailey but it is her family Mhmm.

And they’re from Eastern North Carolina and I guess I just I was wondering what what that meant.

My initial thought was that it was like a onomatopoeia.

Like, I guess I guess you could say a dog that’s, like, panting really hard kinda sounds like it’s making a, like, a hissing sound almost, but I feel like that’s kind of stretched.

That’s why I called in.

Was just really curious about it.

To be clear, when you said vet, you meant veterinarian for the brother.

Exactly.

Yeah, he’s a vet.

Yep.

Yep.

Gotcha.

Okay.

This is very interesting.

So hassle, h a s s l e, looks like the other word, meaning to have Exactly, no one here to exactly.

The hassle that you’re talking about when a dog is, you know, panting, it does have to do with the sound of it.

There are lots of different, words that, that have this sound and connote this idea.

For example, in the nineteenth century in Southeast England, there was the word hustle, h u s s l e, which meant to wheeze or to breathe noisily.

But there are even older forms of this word that that go back to Scotland.

Other hassle, we’re not really sure of, of that origin if you’re talking about somebody who’s harassing you.

Some dictionaries will tell you it’s a combination of hustle and harass, and some think it’s related to that, term that you mentioned involving animals.

So it’s a little bit complicated, but there are lots of different versions of this, aren’t there, Grant?

Yeah, yeah.

Back to the seventeen hundreds and, and Scott’s dialect and in Northern England, many of them showing the connection to Louise through their spelling.

You’ll almost always get an H or WH at the beginning, and then a vowel or schwa, maybe a long E or a long O, and then a double S or a double Z.

And then usually an LE, and that LE suffix is, frequentative, which means it indicates a repetitive act.

So it’s kind of like the word wheeze with the l e added on the end.

So the bottom line is that, your friend and your friend’s family are not at all the only people who have noticed this, this phenomenon and given it a similar sounding name.

Sometimes you will see people that say, Oh, yeah, this is a US Southern thing, but you will also find it in Canada.

Most of the citations in the dictionary American regional language for it are from New England.

So it’s far more widespread than just The US South.

Wow, that’s so interesting.

And of course, as we said, it comes back to, from The UK and Scotland back in the day, three hundred years or so ago.

That’s super cool.

Wow.

All right.

Well, thank you so much for calling.

Yeah, thank you so much.

I’m really excited.

It’s awesome.

Take care of yourself.

We’re glad to have you.

Appreciate it.

Right, thank you.

Take care.

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