Sheep-Dipping

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, good afternoon, Martha.

This is Erin, and I am calling from Cambridge, Wisconsin.

Hi, Erin. Welcome to the show.

What’s going on?

Well, I am calling today because I have a boss that I work with, and she is Southern, very Southern.

And in meetings, I have heard her refer to sheep dipping someone. Typically, it’s used in reference to someone who doesn’t understand a process or hasn’t been introduced to something that we’re working on.

And she says things like, we are going to sheep dip you right down on in here. And I just wondered where that came from. It cracks me up every time.

So you’ve never worked on a farm?

I have not. I live in Wisconsin, but I have never worked on a farm.

Sheep dipping, so it’s this chemical process where you get this sheep to wade through this disinfectant or insecticide to get rid of bugs, basically, to get rid of disease so that the animal is clean.

And so it’s become this metaphor in the business world. It pops up in a couple business jargon dictionaries. It’s become a metaphor for getting somebody over to the side of agreeing to do things the way the company wants to do them, kind of getting them to drink the Kool-Aid more or less.

Is that the way your boss uses it?

Yeah, I think absolutely that sounds correct just in the context that she has used it. I just find it to be a very interesting metaphor, I guess, if you will.

Yeah, I mean, they don’t go head in, but basically their whole body. So sheep will, you know, they’re sheep. They’ll do what you urge them to do. So you channel them in.

You’ve got this big pool of chemicals. They wade through it. Maybe there’s a guy with a bucket pouring some on top or spraying or something like that. And then they walk out the other end into the paddock or the field.

Yeah, and that’s the sense I always had of it was one after another. I’ve heard people compare, you know, like we were just lined up like a sheep dip or something like that. You know, just one after another.

Now, in Paul Dixon’s Dictionary of Americanisms, he has sheep dip, and he says just a sales seminar. But most of the uses that I find, for example, there’s a website called The Office Life that defines a lot of business jargon. It says a tedious corporate briefing where attendance is mandatory and recorded for all employees. Sorry, required for all employees.

Erin, it sounds like you can relate to that.

I absolutely can. Do you want to elaborate on that?

We’re talking indoctrination, right?

We are. No, I actually, I work for a remote company. And so we, all of our meetings are remote. So it’s a whole group of people around what’s even worse, right? Speaker phones and cell phones and bad traffic and bad connections.

And so it certainly is an exercise in both patients. And I would say waiting through a vat of chemicals to come out the other side. But you come out clean. You come out, everyone comes out the same. And you come out free of bugs and weirdness, right?

You hope.

Yeah, I think your definition of clean might be a little bit different than mine. There is one interesting little factoid. There is a book of fiction that I read that suggests that in the intelligence community, sheep dip is when spies, like say CIA and SA, try to pass their employees off as regular folks or try to make it look like they work in the private sector, even though they work for the spying agencies.

And they call that sheep dipping to create this whole profile or dossier of this person. And so they look like a normal human being and not a super spy.

Interesting.

So are you suggesting that perhaps my boss is trying to pass herself off and she’s really inoperative?

You know what? Look for grappling hooks in her handbag.

There we go. Leather gloves. Is there a red light flashing on the lipstick tube?

Well, thank you both so very much. This has been really enlightening. I’ve been in the business world for about 20 years, and I don’t know that until I joined this company, I had not heard anyone use it in that way.

Okay, yeah. Well, good. Glad to help. And thanks for sharing. We’ve got one more data point that it’s used that way by a Southern woman in Wisconsin.

There we go. Well, thank you so much. Take care, Erin.

Yeah, keep an eye on her.

All right.

I will. Don’t worry. Bye-bye.

Have a good day.

Bye-bye.

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