It would be pretty unlikely to find a sewer in a sewer, and although a sewer might work in a sewer’s vicinity, if the sewer malfunctioned or ceased working altogether the sewer would almost certainly move to a new location a comfortable distance from the sewer.
What we have there is a perfectly good sentence, even though it’s a bit odd. There are two “sewers” in English. One of them, spelled “sewer” and pronounced “SO-er,” is a person who sews (with a needle and thread). The other, also spelled “sewer” but pronounced “SOO-er,” is a drain. Although the two words are indistinguishable in print and must be interpreted from context (hopefully ambiguous in the first sentence), it’s just one of those coincidences you get in a language containing over 300,000 words.
The “sewer” that uses a needle and thread dates back to the 1300s, and has been spelled “sower,” “sawer,” and “shewer.” In Old English it could be “siowain,” “seuen,” and “seuwen.” The first citation in the OED is from the poem “Richard the Redeles” from 1399. This passage is about a very fancy puffy sleeve, which I guess was very stylish back then:
‘Seuene goode sowers sixe wekes after
Moun not sett þe seemes ne sewe hem aȝeyn”
The updated version is:
“Seven good sewers, for six weeks afterward,
May not set the seams nor sew it together again”.
Hey I said it was a old poem; I made no claim about it being any good.
Samuel Johnson, who set himself up as possibly the first authority on English when he published his dictionary in 1755, chose the “sewer” spelling as the most correct. “Sewer” is still in use, which is a pretty good run for a word that predates English entirely; it probably goes back to Proto-Indo-European.
The “sewer” that’s a drain is also pretty old; it entered English in the early 1400s from Old French, where it was “seuwiere” or “sewiere,” and originally meant “an underground pipe.” It was the early 1600s when the modern sense of “sewer” arose, meaning “an artificial channel or conduit, now usually covered and underground, for carrying off and discharging waste water and refuse from houses and towns”. The first citation using this meaning is from Shakespeare, in fact, when the jester Thersites says:
“Sweet draught, ‘sweet’ quoth ‘a! sweet sinke, sweet sure.”
(In this case, Shakespeare spelled “sewer” as “sure”.) The line is from Troilus and Cressida, 1609.
So now that’s all sewn up (by the way, “sewed” is also used), this message can be tossed away into the sewer.
