It’s chucking it down. You stand at the window, watching the garden turn into a paddling pool, and announce to the empty room, “It’s raining cats and dogs.”
Nobody checks the lawn for cats. No dog is plummeting past the bedroom window. Your actual dog, meanwhile, has decided the outdoors has been cancelled and is refusing to leave the hall.
And yet everybody understands you perfectly. We have a saying that describes a farmyard falling from the sky, and we say it with a straight face. Try it on a visitor who is learning English. “It’s raining cats and dogs.” “Where?” Fair question.
So where did it come from? Brace yourself, because the honest answer is that nobody knows.
That hasn’t stopped people inventing wonderfully confident explanations. The most popular is that old thatched roofs were home to cats and dogs, and a proper downpour washed them out. It’s a charming picture, and there’s no real evidence for it. Another claims that in seventeenth-century streets, heavy rain swept dead animals along the gutters. Jonathan Swift did describe something like that in a poem about a city shower in 1710, which is where the theory borrows its credibility, but he never used the phrase there. There’s even a Norse version, in which cats stand for storms and dogs for wind. Lovely, but unproven.
What we can say is that the idea is old. A play from around the middle of the seventeenth century has someone threatening that it will rain dogs and polecats, which sounds like a much worse afternoon. The version we use today turns up in print in 1738, in Swift’s Polite Conversation, a satire on fashionable chit-chat. So the saying has been making no sense for nearly three hundred years, and shows no sign of embarrassment.
Other languages are no more sensible. Greek speakers say it’s raining chair legs. The Welsh say it’s raining old women and sticks. Suddenly cats and dogs look rather restrained.
So the next time the sky empties, say it without a flicker of shame. Nobody can explain it, but nobody’s confused either. Just keep an eye on the dog. He’s the only one who seems entirely certain about the weather.
Go on, confess: which saying do you use every week without a clue what it means? I want the ones I haven’t covered yet.
