Dog show denizens are well acquainted with how a setter is stacked in the show ring: Gentle fingers hold up the head, the tail is extended to its full glory, and the tip is held by an open hand. There’s a name for the long hair that hangs clown from the tail of the setter, and these days, it’s called “feathering” or feathers.” Back in the day, however, it was known as a “Comb-Fringe.”

The term “comb-fringe” first appeared in the 1880s, and the earliest known use of it was attributed to W. G. Stables in 1884 (Oxford English Dictionary) – but we first found the term in “The New Book of the Dog” by Robert Leighton, published around 1907.

Photo taken at the Bozeman/Helena Cluster in 2013 and posted on Wikicommons by SheltieBoy. It’s shared under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.