If you have any doubt about how much of our heritage derives from our pastoral, agrarian past you might think about how much of our vocabulary descends from it. This week, as we endured the agonizing wait to know who won the election, two words from that past kept coming to my mind: bellwether and tenterhooks

A bellwether is an indicator of what’s going to come in the future. We use the term a lot in election years. When I was a boy, the saying went “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” Maine was considered a “bellwether state.” I knew it was a metaphor of sorts, but the picture in my mind when I heard it was spelled “bell-weather;” I saw a bell swinging in the wind, sort of like a weathervane, that would somehow tell us the direction things were going in.

Once we had the farm and a flock of sheep, my erudite late partner, Peter, explained to me that the term in fact described the wether, or castrated male sheep, who wore a bell and led the flock. Our wether Orhan essentially served in that capacity for over 12 years. Orhan was one of the first two ram lambs born on the farm. His mother, who produced insufficient milk for both her twins, favored Orhan’s brother, and we had to supplement Orhan’s milk with a bottle.

We eventually sold Orhan’s twin, sexually intact, as a breeder. But Orhan, who like the vast majority of ram lambs on the farm was neutered, became like a pet. His dual affections, for the flock and us, were useful to us. If we wanted the flock to come, we just had to attract Orhan, and the rest would follow. Explaining what a wether is, introducing Orhan, and then giving the derivation of the term bellwether became staples of my guided tours for guests of the farm.

While we owe the term bellwether to sheep, we owe the term tenterhooks to processing their wool. Traditionally, after woolen garments were made and washed, they were stretched tight on wooden frames, held in place by a series of hooked nails, to prevent the fabric from shrinking as it dried. The stretching frames are called tenters (from a Latin root meaning “stretch”) and the hooked nails are thus tenterhooks. The process itself goes back to the 14th century. The first use of the term “on tenterhooks,” meaning to be in a state of painful anxiety, is recorded in literature in 1748.

I think it would be fair to say that many of you, like me, have been on tenterhooks all week, as we have contemplated our latest bellwethers, especially Pennsylvania, for signs of which way the presidential election would go. So much so that the two words kept colliding in my mind, with the mash-up, the image of a bellwether on tenterhooks, bringing a particularly horrific and agonizing vision to mind. And maybe an appropriately horrific one, given the stresses we all felt in the long wait.

The image of a bellwether on tenterhooks got me thinking about the polar oppositions that we see ourselves as being stretched between. It has made me question even the nature of a bellwether. When I was younger, whether it was Maine, or later Missouri or Ohio, that were considered bellwethers, I had the vision that those places were, unlike liberal New York or conservative Alabama, populated by people with ambiguous ideology who, like a great sea of Orhans, could be swayed in one direction or another.

Now I am seeing that bellwether states are more likely those with a somewhat equal numbers of ardent liberals and conservatives, often reflected in the rural urban divide, and that the swing back and forth is largely the effect of which side provides greater motivation to its members to come out and vote in a given election. The middle of the roaders are there, but there are fewer of them and polarization is pulling them into different camps.

As numerous commentators have noted, that polarization is severe, and it is everywhere. The sides see each other in caricature only, defined by their most extreme elemen