Purely by chance, I read this “Under the Dome” item about North Carolina’s potential status as an electoral bellwether shortly after reading the “bellwether” entry in Safire’s Political Dictionary.
For those interested in the term’s history, here’s a quote:
Literally, a wether is a male sheep; the leading sheep of the flock sometimes wears a bell. In 1878 Harper’s Weekly observed that the unthinking crowd would “follow the bellwether over any wall and into any pasture, but the independent sheep would not.”
