walk the dog
v. phr.— «Another one is a sports term known as “walked the dog.” When a reader shared that one with me, it actually was the second time I’d heard it. The first time was from my wife’s cousin, Tony, who was excited about a big win that was produced by the 12-year-old-girls’ softball team he coached. “Aw, man, we walked the dog on that other team,” he said.» —“Walked the dog has me bumfuzzled” by Bernie Delinski Times Daily (Florence, Alabama) Feb. 21, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
In the 15th century, the word respair meant “to have hope again.” Although this word fell out of use, it’s among dozens collected in a new book of soothing vocabulary for troubled times. Plus, baseball slang: If a batter...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski insists that the names of modern Olympic sports resulted from changing one letter in the original names for each activity. For example, he says, the pole vault must have originated from an earlier sport in which participants...
too bad it’s not as colorful as the bicyclist ‘walk the dog’, from “faire pisser le chien” — (French) to take the dog out for a leak, to go for an easy ride usually the day after a brutally hard ride.
I heard it used once in a conversation about testing software. By context, it seemed to mean going through all the motions OR a parade of the software functions. Like at a dog show.