Sometimes we like to turn our Word of the Week toward some real fun, looking at phrases we use in English without thinking about what the heck they mean or where they could possibly come from, such as the one I’ve got above, raining cats and dogs. That will be fit for the springtime too, right, with its April showers? We mean that it’s raining really hard, but — cats and dogs? In Wales, cats and dogs don’t fall out of the sky. The Welsh say, Mae’n bwrw hen wragedd y ffyn — “It’s raining old ladies and sticks!” Hmm — could it be that it’s raining so hard, witches are falling out of the sky? I seem to remember such an incident in the Land of Oz, happening to the Wicked Witch of the East. It wouldn’t have happened to the Wicked Witch of the Southwest, because it doesn’t ever rain down there, but it might have happened to the Wicked Witch of Indianapolis, because how else can God grow them little green apples? Now — cats and dogs? In Portugal, it would be chover cobras e lagartos — “raining snakes and lizards,” which seems to me a lot more unpleasant, and not as humorously ridiculous as cats and dogs falling from the sky. And see the picture from 1820 that Debra found below, for raining “cats and dogs and pitchforks,” and what it would look like if it really did!
Sometimes a saying moseys along sideways from something that really did happen, sort of, and so you can find a plausible explanation for it. The two that I’ve found, though, don’t sound right to me. That is, they sound too pat, too “reasonable,” and not humorous at all. One is that in a really hard rain, the thatch over your simple dwelling might get loose, and a cat up there would fall into the middle of your parlor. Doesn’t sound right; a cat won’t fall from a greased flagpole, but from thatch, with all the stuff to claw onto? The other explanation is that in places like London and Edinburgh, the sewers would back up after a heavy rain, and strew the streets with drowned cats and dogs. But that’s only after the rain, and there’s no image associated with it — and no fun, either. These are only people’s guesses. There’s no evidence for either one. Maybe the “answer” is just that somebody somewhere came up with an image of complete yowling and howling and storming bad weather, so why not cats and dogs? That’s at least as ridiculous as nasty old ladies falling out of the sky.
an’s best friend does get a bad rap in popular sayings, and he really doesn’t deserve it. In 1550, a sixteen year old girl named Elizabeth Tudor wrote a letter to her kid brother, Edward Tudor, who happened to be the King of England at that time, because Ned had asked her for a picture of herself. Bess made light of herself, saying, “a dog hath his day,” meaning that even she might get herself painted, if Ned wanted her to. Bess went on to become queen, as you know, and got herself painted a lot, and painted herself a lot too, so that when she was old, the makeup was crusted on her face like a mask. Dogs don’t do that.
By then, you may say, Elizabeth’s looks had “gone to the dogs” — but why not “gone to the cats,” or “gone to the mules,” or “gone to the horses”? Here we do have an explanation, and there’s some evidence for it. When that war-loving foul-playing Jehu king of Israel — still better than most of them, and that says a lot about how bad they were — came to Jezreel, where the wicked queen Jezebel lived, she painted her eyes and got her hair all coiffed and made eyes at him from the window. But Jehu was having none of it. He ordered her to be thrown from the window, where she fell to her death. After he and his men went inside and ate and drank, it occurred to Jehu that maybe they ought to bury the cursed woman, seeing that she was after all the daughter of a king. But when they got there, there wasn’t anything left of Jezebel but the skull and the hands and the feet. So did Elijah the prophet foretell: “In the territory of Jezreel the dogs shall eat the flesh of Jezebel.” That’s a likely origin of the English phrase, “to go to the dogs.” But it might have a somewhat nicer origin. Hunters with their hounds would feed the dogs some of what they’d helped them bag — not the choicest cuts, but the stuff that people don’t like as much, like the lungs, or the “numbles,” though if you did keep them, you’d season them pretty heavily and make a numble pie out of them. I’ve never eaten a numble pie, nor do I care to!
When you think of it, plenty of sayings in English come from a time when people were far more familiar with wild creatures and domesticated livestock than we are now. “The early bird gets the worm” — but how many of us are up at 6 AM to watch the robin pulling a worm out of the ground? You shouldn’t “buy a pig in a poke,” meaning that you shouldn’t buy a piglet in a bag. “When somebody gives you a pig,” said a proverb-maker named Hendyng in the 1300’s, though he said it in Middle English, “open the pouch.” But going back to the humble worm: we say, “the worm has turned,” but why a worm? Why not a hedgehog or a chipmunk? The idea was that the worm is the humblest of creatures, but even he will turn against you if you provoke him. So said the proverb-recorder John Heywood in 1546: “Tread a worm on the tail, and it must turn again.” I’d say that the worm “got his dander up,” but worms don’t have dander — or dandruff, which is pretty much the same thing. It comes from the scruff or the scurf: imagine a dog or a cat with his hair bristling up in anger.
But I like dogs too much to end on that note. The proverbial name for a dog in English used to be FIDO, a play on Latin FIDES, meaning TRUST, FAITH; or on the related Italian FIDO, meaning I TRUST. Fido is a trustworthy dog, and he trusts you, too. Was any dog ever really named FIDO? Yes, apparently. Fido was Abraham Lincoln’s favorite dog, a big yellow mutt and family pet. Fido was there at the president’s funeral in Springfield, Illinois. He died later that year at the age of 14, stabbed by a man whittling a piece of wood. One account says it was accidental, another says that the man was drunk and did it on purpose. Ah, if only people were as loyal as their dogs!
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