How did the French phrase “Il tombe des cordes” come to mean ‘heavy rain?’.
I learned it as “il pleut des cordes,” basically translated as “it’s raining ropes.” Personally, it’s easier for me to make the connection between heavy rain falling and the image of thin silvery ropes than it is to explain the phrase “it’s raining cats and dogs.”
It’s not unlike the English idiom “it’s coming down in sheets.”
I think it makes sense. “It’s falling in ropes” implies rain so heavy that it’s falling in thick, solid lines, similar to, “it’s coming down in sheets,” as nametag said. It certainly makes more sense than “It’s raining cats and dogs.”
Another similar English one would be 'coming down like stair rods".
The phrase “cat and dog” originally meant anything furious, as you might imagine a fight between a cat and dog. So “it’s raining cats and dogs” means that it is raining furiously.
Of the numerous attempts that I’ve seen to explain this phrase, that is the first one that actually sounds believable. I don’t suppose you have such a thing as a cite, do you?
Oxford English Dictionary, WotNot.
Cecil seems to think it is not so cut-and-dried:
[quote]
…there are many competing explanations. A sample:
[ol][li]It comes from the Greek catadupe, waterfall. In other words, it’s coming down in cataracts. [/li][li]It comes from the Latin cata doxas, contrary to experience, i.e., it’s raining unusually hard. [/li][li]In Germanic mythology cats were associated with storms and rain, whereas dogs were attendants of Odin the storm god and were symbols of the winds. Ergo, raining cats and dogs means you have a lot of wind (the dogs’ department) and rain (the cats’ bailiwick). [/li][li]In medieval London stormwater would sluice down the narrow streets and drown stray cats and dogs, whose corpses would then be discovered in the gutters afterward by the emerging humans. Aha! they said, it must have rained C&D[/ol][/li][/quote]
Well, Cecil isn’t perfect.
- Cecil seems to have ignored the OED’s explanation of the phrase cat and dog: “Referring to the proverbial emnity between the two animals: attrib. Full of strife, inharmonious; quarrelsome.”
- Cecil does not address the history of how the phrase “cat and dog” was used. Its earliest uses are not weather related, but are used in a general sense to mean “furiously”. Examples given in the OED:
1579 Gosson: “He . . . shall see them agree like Dogges and Cattes.”
before 1745 Swift: "They keep at Staines the old Blue Boar, Are cat and dog, and rogue and whore.
1821 Scott: “Married he was . . . and a cat-and-dog life she led with Tony.”
1822 Cobbett: “The fast-sinking Old Times newspaper, its cat-and-dog opponent the New Times.”
The usage of the phrase “cat and dog” has become limited over the centuries, and today is used only in the phrase “raining like cats and dogs”.