S. Worthen | Weblog

Thinking on it further - damn you for your questioning ways! - it occurs to me that there was at least conversation if not controversy when I was a kid, about whether it was "dragging" or "wagging". I'm fairly sure that "dragging" was the ur-text, at least for me; "wagging" may have come with the song. Or it may have made better sense to us, because lambs certainly do wag their tails, while no sheep of my acquaintance had anything big enough to drag (the notion of fat-tailed sheep was utterly unknown to us, an undiscovered country etc). Even so, I do now and I think I would then have stood by "dragging" as the proper version.