Raining cats and dogs

[Gerald Cohen]

     Whenever I'm asked the origin of " It's raining cats and dogs" I
say that the answer is unknown and none of the guesses are
convincing. How many ads-l members have ever seen a single cat or dog
come floating down the street in a heavy rain that's not an outright
flood?  In a flood, EVERYTHING comes floating down, including people
and houses; there's no need to zero in on just cats and dogs.

     So I will now advance my own guess, FWIW: There's the standard
expression "They fight like cats and dogs," with the reference to the
furious fighting of these two animals. Maybe (and I have no evidence
for this), the rain expression was originally "It's raining like cats
and dogs," (i.e., furiously), then "like" was dropped resulting in
"It's raining cats and dogs."

Gerald Cohen


At 12:15 PM -0400 4/14/02, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:
>There's a lot of nonsense on the Web, of course. Quinion's site (among a
>few others) is generally reasonable, IMHO:
>
>http://www.quinion.com/words/
>
>When I looked into this one some time ago, I arrived at the conclusion that
>the "animal corpses in the gutters" etymology-theory was as good as any.
>
>Farmer and Henley (1891) quote Swift (1710): "Now from all parts the
>swelling kennels flow, And bear their trophies with them as they go ...
>Drown'd puppies, stinking sprats, all drench'd in mud, Dead cats, and
>turnip-tops, come tumbling down the flood."
>
>The idea I think is that a heavy rain will lift even large pieces of
>garbage/debris -- such as animal corpses -- not that the animals were
>necessarily actually killed by the rain (although newborn
>puppies/kittens/etc. might have been).
>
>