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 Any
non-native English speaker may be taken aback by the curious story of cats and
dogs pouring from the sky.
You won't
be very surprised to notice that English idioms are also very often linked to
Maritime history as in the expression "cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass
monkey" (extremely cold weather). The background to this phrase comes from cannon
balls used on warships being kept on a brass metal rack called a monkey. These
iron cannon balls shrunk more than the brass in freezing conditions and the
balls slipped out of the rack rolling onto the deck of the boat.
Also,
black cats were once treated like royalty in the homes of English sailors, who
believed that keeping them happy would ensure fair weather when they went to
sea. They became so highly priced that only a few sailors could afford them.
It is curious that many
other languages also use animals and rather violent tools in their weather expressions
and idioms:
Afrikaans: "it rains like old women with
knobkerries"
Catalan: "it pours boats and casks"
Czech: "it's
raining wheelbarrows"
Danish: "it's
raining shoemaker apprentices"
Dutch: "it
rains pipe stems"
French: "it rains like a pissing cow"
Japanese: "earth
and sand are falling"
Slovak:
"tractors are falling"
Spanish: "the octopus is pouring"
Furthermore, halberds are falling
in French, pikes in Spanish, ladles in Swedish, knives and forks in Welsh. Haitian Creole has an
imaginative way of putting it as "dogs are drinking in their noses"; in Mandarin Chinese, one would say "basin
bending, big rain is falling" and in
most languages, it rains buckets: in Bulgarian, Croatian, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and
Serbian.
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