April 21, 1997

withers

A surprisingly young coworker (admittedly one who reads 19th-century English literature) exclaimed today, "Well, wring my withers!" in response to a whine of some kind. Now I find that Shakespeare unwrung someone's withers in "Hamlet." Do I have withers too? Are they like a dowager's hump? Why are they wrung if I cry?

I've never met you, but I highly doubt you have withers. The withers (a singular referent, but in -s and always taking a plural verb) are the highest part of the back, found at the base of the neck bewteen the shoulder blades, of a horse or other quadruped.

The wring here is an application of the usual sense 'to twist', meaning something like 'to injure' (thought not necessary through twisting--compare the expression "it wrings my heart"). Figurative use of a wring/withers connection seems to have been a fave of our friend Bill; he uses it first in Henry IV part I: "[The] poor jade is wrung in the withers" (II.i.7). The Hamlet example is particularly obscure: in the great Players scene (III.ii), Hamlet says to Claudius, "Let the galled jade winch: our withers are unwrung." The first bit means 'let the chafed horse wince', and the second part means 'my back is unchafed' and hence 'I am uninjured'; 'I am not guilty'. (Hamlet is trying to get Claudius to react guiltily when the Players perform a version of Claudius' murder of Hamlet's father.)

There are various allusions to this phrase in literature. Dickens, in Dombey and Son, has "Rob the Grinder, whose withers were not unwrung, caught the words as they were spoken." William James notes "'External relations' stand with their withers all unwrung, and remain, for aught he proves to the contrary, not only practically workable, but also perfectly intelligible factors of reality." (We'll take "perfectly intelligible" on faith here.)

I am not aware of the interjectional use of wring my withers!, and I've searched through a big heap of 19th-century literature to find it. But it sounds like a plausible phrase, and I'm sure it's somewhere out there. I can't tell exactly how your friend is using the phrase, but "Twist my arm!" could be a valid comparison. It's worth noting that wring my withers! itself is not necessarily a Shakespearean allusion; writers have discussed horses literally being wrung in the withers by a poor saddle about twenty years before Shakespeare wrote.

The usual explanation for the origin of withers, which is first attested in the late sixteenth century, is that it's from the obsolete wither 'against' (ultimately related to with), in reference to the strain against the withers when a horse pulls a load.