SAY: It’s raining cats and dogs! Really? Where would such an off-turn of phrase come from? The website babbel.com has a story about phrases that don’t make sense.
“In all of recorded weather history, there have been a few occasions of animals falling from the sky. Strong winds during storms have caused water-friendly creatures like fish and frogs to pelt the very shocked humans on the land below. But never has there ever been a report of cats and dogs raining down.”
That’s good, no one wants to step in a poodle (ahh, see what we did there?).
“Unfortunately, it’s unclear where the idea of pet showers came from. Theories range from it being a mishearing of the Old English word ‘catadupe,’ which meant waterfall, to it being a reference to Norse mythology. We do know that the earliest reference to the idea comes from a 17th century poetry collection by Henry Vaughan, who wrote that a roof would survive ‘dogs and cats rained in shower.’ Perhaps the idea, then, was simply that if dogs and cats did rain from the sky, they would do quite a bit of damage to the buildings below.”
What about excessive perspiration, would you sweat like a pig?
“This one might seem to make sense. Pigs sweat a lot, don’t they? Turns out, they don’t, really. They have a few sweat glands like other mammals, yes, but their preferred method of cooling down is to find a nice mud bath.”
It’s a shortening of another phrase, “to sweat like a pig iron,” a process during which hot iron was poured on sand and formed little shapes that looked like pigs. Thus, pig iron.
More to come.
