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
If you speak a second or third language, you may remember the first time you dreamed in that new tongue. But does this milestone mean you’re actually fluent? And a couple’s dispute over the word regret: Say you wish you’d been able...
While reading Dean Koontz’s book The House at the End of the World (Bookshop|Amazon), a listener in Ramona, California, encountered the perfect word for the walks he takes with his dog. He now refers to such an excursion as a sniffari. This is...
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.