Question JJ156 on the DARE questionnaire, skillfully designed to elicit regionalisms, is "Sayings about a person who seems to you very stupid: 'He doesn't know ----.' " Although some would respond with a brief expletive, DARE's query drew 27 answers of Sic 'em, along with these more detailed responses: " 'Here' from sic 'em," "Sic 'em from 'come here' " and "Sic 'em from 'go get 'em.' "

When American Speech magazine queried readers about sic 'em in 1961, one observed that his mother heard it from Arkansas friends who owned hound dogs. Another reader, the great San Francisco dialexicographer Peter Tamony, replied: "The remark describes an unresponsive, indolent, shiftless person. He is like a dog that shows no courageous and instant reaction to the command 'sic 'em.' " Mr. Tamony gave an etymological insight by adding that sic 'em is "merely a pronunciation modification of seek 'em or seek 'im."

The earliest citations are from Stewart Edward White's 1907 "Arizona Nights": "You see, for all their plumb nerve in comin' so far, the most of them didn't know sic 'em. . . . I didn't know sic 'em about minin'." In Ramon Adams's 1968 "Western Words," the term is defined as "a cowboy's expression meaning 'ignorant.' I have heard many unique references to ignorance, like 'He don't know 'nough to pack guts to a bear,' 'He don't know dung from wild honey' and many others. Ted Logan referred to a man with 'His head's so hollow he's got to talk with his hands to get away from the echo.' "

The key is the unspoken from. Not to know sic 'em (sometimes spelled sickum) means not to distinguish the master's command to his dog to attack from the entirely different command "come here." (This is not a canine slur; either the master or the dog can be the stupid party. Or both can be: when I say sic 'em! to James, my Bernese mountain dog, he snarls ferociously and comes at me.)

Modern dialect users are more familiar with not knowing from beans, which probably originated in "not knowing split beans from coffee beans," or "not knowing beans from barley," "beans from bullfrogs," etc. The key from is found in "not knowing cow chips from kumquats," a fine double alliteration; indeed, alliteration is frequent in this trope of comparison, as the makers of Shinola shoe polish learned to their rue. Today, the from is usually dropped, and "He don't know beans" is all that remains.