Oct 05 2008
A Bit of a DAG
A friend alerted me to the term ‘dag’ being great for this blog category. AND to be honest it was my next term to add. I don’t use it much BUT its such a ‘kiwi’ term, it evokes so many things ‘kiwi’.
What is a DAG?
In is most down to earth sense and rawest use, a DAG is the poohs of a sheep that colects on the wool around a sheeps backside as it exits and falls to the ground. It builds up and collects on the wool around that area of the sheeps anatomy.NOW remember sheep like humans have poohs that arrives in the outer world in differing consistencies. Sometimes it get VERY runny and this is termed as the sheep having ’scours” (please dad help me here with the spelling)
SO the collective build up of sheep droppings collect on the wool and it dries in hot weather or stays moist, BUT a build up it is nonetheless.
That is a DAG, and such terms as ‘rattle your dags’ comes from them looking like rattles hanging around the sheeps bum.
Before the sheep is shorn FARMERS remove the dags for the shearers. This process is called ‘crutching’.
Heres what ‘wiki’ says about dags. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAG
I will try and find a photo soon.
One of the reasons sheep are ‘crutched’ is to stop flies doing annoying things at that end of the sheep because of the attractive morsels there..
There are offshots to this term ‘DAG’, which I will explore in other posts. PERHAPS others could add to it.
They include such terms as ‘a bit of a dag!’, FRED DAG himself, rattle your dags etc.
Yeah, that’s a good one Graham. ‘course, in NZ it’s okay for a person to be ‘a bit of a dag’ - generally it means they’re a hard case (is that another kiwi term?), as in humourous. But in Oz, it’s not so good to be a ‘dag’. More of an insult.
Yeah I think you are right John about the hard case thing…………and I didn,t know the Ozzy slant