It's raining cats and dogs!

12/08/2011

Test your knowledge of the English language with Mature Times writer Catherine McFarland. This month we explore the origins of a well-known phrase, “Raining Cats and Dogs”. 

 

‘It’s raining cats and dogs’ is one phrase in the English language with which we’re all too familiar. It’s a bit of an odd metaphor, though, don’t you think? If you take it literally, there is potential for some quite serious pain, and I can’t imagine it would do the camellias any good.

 

Here are three popular origins to the phrase; none of which is definitive but only one has any real evidence from what I can tell. Have a read and let me know which one you think nails it. Or maybe you have some other ideas. We’ll publish the results of your feedback on the Mature Times website.

 

The mythological explanation

 

One possible origin is that the phrase derives from mythology. There is a real smorgasbord of options here that could naturally pave the way for the expression. For instance, dogs (wolves) were attendants to Odin, a Norse god of storms, and much nautical and other folklore associates the behaviour and appearance of cats with the weather. 

 

For example, it is said that sailors used cats to predict the voyages upon which they were about to embark. Loudly mewing cats meant that it would be a difficult voyage; and a playful cat meant the voyage would see good and gusty winds. And let’s not forget the cats who would ride the winds on witches’ broomsticks, of course.

 

Origins in the slippery shelter of thatched roofs

 

Another popular explanation is that small animals, including cats and dogs, would shelter from the weather in the thatched roofs of dwellings. It is said, though, that these would make slippery homes for the animals, and it wasn’t uncommon for them to fall off in the heavy rains.

 

There is, however, no actual proof that I can find for either of these explanations. My money’s on this next one.

 

Street floods

 

Jonathan Swift, of Gulliver’s Travels fame, makes an initial allusion to the phrase in his 1710 poem, A Description of a City Shower’. It contains the following lines:

Sweeping from butchers’ stalls,

 

dung, guts, and blood;

 

Drown’d puppies, stinking sprats,

 

all drench’d in mud,

 

Dead cats, and turnip-tops,

 

come tumbling down the flood.

 

Thirty years later he makes the first direct reference to the phrase in its modern form in his work entitled A Complete Collection of Polite and Ingenious Conversation. He writes:

 

“I know Sir John will go, though he was sure it would rain cats and dogs”. It seems plausible to conclude that he was penning an expression that he himself had created earlier that century.

 

What do you think? As a ‘swift’ aside, I must say though that I am very grateful not to have to investigate the rather unfortunate Danish expression ‘det regner med skomagerdrenge’, which translates as ‘it’s raining shoemakers’ apprentices’. Or an alarmingly pungent Cantonese expression, which means ‘dog poo is falling’. Or, indeed, Norway’s rather creepy ‘det regner trollkjerringer’- it’s raining female trolls. Urgh. Sends shivers down my spine...