rain cats and dogs

Erik (the cat) and Lila (the dog) poised for conflict (or in their case, snuggles).

30 December 2022

The phrase to rain cats and dogs means to rain heavily, to storm. The underlying metaphor is quite straightforward, likening a storm to cats and dogs fighting. But despite being rather obvious, numerous spurious explanations for the phrase have arisen.

The idea of cats and dogs being sworn enemies and always at odds with one another dates to at least the sixteenth century. It appears in a 1557 translation of a dialogue by Erasmus:

Eulalya. I wyll tell you a prety story more, and so make an ende One of oure neyghboures, a well disposed and a goddes man, but that he is some what testie, on a day pomeld his wife well and thriftely aboute the pate and so good a woman as euer was borne, she picked her into a inner parler, and there weepynge and sobbynge, eased her heuye harte, anone after, by chaunce her husbande came into the same place, and founde hys wyfe wepyng. What sitest thou heare sayth he seighing & sobbig like a child The[n] she like a wise woman sayde. Is it not more honesty for me to lamente my dolours here in a secret place, the[n] to make wondering and on oute crye in the strete, as other wome[n] do. At so wysely and womanly a saing his hart melted, promysynge her faythfullye and truelie that he woulde neuer laye stroke on her afterwarde, nor neuer did.

Xantippa. No more wil mine god thanke my selfe.

Eulalya. But then ye are alwaies one at a nother, agreinge lyke dogges and cattes.

Erasmus’s original Latin, however, does not contain the simile of dogs and cats. It reads:

Sed interim est inter uos bellum perpetuum.

(But, nevertheless, there is continuous conflict between you two.)

The metaphor of a storm being a fight between cats and dogs appears a century later. In the earliest appearance that we know of, it is polecats instead of domestic cats, but this is a result of wordplay, so the phrase rain dogs and polecats is an allusion to the already existing, but as yet unrecorded, rain dogs and cats. It appears in Richard Brome’s play The City Witt, published in 1653 but written no later than 1652, the year of Brome’s death:

Sar[pego]. I will now breath a most strong and Poeticall execration
Against the Universe.     (Bri[dget].) Sir I beseech you—

Sar. From henceforth Erit Fluvius Deucalionis
The world shall flow with dunces; Regnabitque, and it shall raine
Dogmata Polla Sophon, Dogs and Polecats, and so forth.

Brome is mixing up Latin, Greek, and English here for satirical effect. The Latin erit fluvius Deucalionis means “it shall be the river of Deucalion”; Deucalion being a Noah-like character in a classical flood myth. Regnabitque literally means “and it shall rain.” But then Brome has Sarpego mistake Greek for Latin. In Greek dogmata polla sophon means “many are the doctrines of the wise,” but in Latin these words would mean something along the lines of “the doctrines of inconsequential wise men”; in other words, regnabitque dogmata polla sophon could mean something like and the world shall flow with dunces. And after this bit of bad Latin, Sarpego goes on to mistranslate dogmata as “dogs” and polla as “polecats,” a move Brome executes to make wordplay alluding to the English phrase rain cats and dogs.  

We see the actual phrasing rain dogs and cats a few years later in Thomas Flatman’s 1661 Don Juan Lambeto:

I am right glad to see you Sr. Lambert, though not so glad to see you here, however it is better to be here than in the open Fields, where there is no shelter against the Rain, nor any other kind of storm that should happen, for here we have Houses over our heads, so that if it should rain Dogs and Cats we could have no harm.

And in the early eighteenth century we see the animals’ order flipped to the familiar rain cats and dogs. From Jonathan Swift’s 1738 Compleat Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation:

Nev[erout]. Come, Sir John, I foresee it will rain terribly.

Lord Sm[art]. Come, Sir John, do nothing rashly, let us drink first.

Lord Sp[arkish]. Nay, I know Sir John will go, though he was sure it would rain Cats and Dogs. But pray stay, Sir John, you’ll be Time enough to go to Bed by Candle-light.

Despite having a simple and obvious explanation, the phrase has inspired a number of fanciful origin stories that at best have little evidence to support them and at worst are obvious hoaxes.

Perhaps the most famous is the internet myth that states the phrase is from the fact that dogs and cats (and other animals) would live in thatched roofs of medieval homes. Heavy rain would drive the cats and dogs out of their rooftop beds, hence the phrase. This is just patently untrue and displays total ignorance of the qualities of thatched roofs, not to mention the ability of dogs to climb.

Another explanation, one with a bit more behind it, claims that the phrase is a reference to heavy rains in London drowning stray cats and dogs, leaving the streets looking like the animal carcasses had fallen from the skies. Again, we turn to Swift, who uses this imagery in his 1710 Description of a City Shower:

Now from all Parts the swelling Kennels flow,
And bear their Trophies with them as they go:
Filths of all Hues and Odours, see to tell
What Street they sail’d from, by their Sight and Smell.
They, as each Torrent drives, with rapid Force
From Smithfield, or St. Pulchre’s, shape their Course,
And in huge Confluent join at Snowhill Ridge,
Fall from the Conduit prone to Holbourn-Bridge.
Sweepings from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood,
Drown’d Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench’d in Mud,
Dead Cats, and TurnipTops, come tumbling down the Flood.

But not only is the phrase rain cats and dogs in use before Swift penned this, the rain does not consist of dogs and cats, rather it is what kills them. Furthermore, the poem is a spoof on Virgil’s Georgics, so shouldn’t be taken literally.

Other proffered explanations include the idea that the phrase is from the archaic French catdoupe, meaning waterfall or cataract, or that it uses imagery from Norse mythology, where cats had an influence on the weather, and Odin, the sky god, was attended by wolves. All of these are unlikely given the early metaphorical uses of cats and dogs to signify something noisy and violent. The actual explanation is the simplest. The noise and violence of a storm is the metaphorical equivalent of a cat and dog fight.

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Sources:

Brome, Richard. “The City Witt” (1652?). Five New Plays. London: Humphrey Moseley, et al., 1653, 4.1., sig. D7v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Erasmus, Desiderius. Colloquiorum familiarium opus. Basel: Michael Ising, 1543, 250. Google Books.

———. A Mery Dialogue, Declaringe the Propertyes of Shrowde Shrewes, and Honest Wyues. London: J. Cawood for Antony Kytson, 1557, sig. B5r–B5v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Flatman, Thomas. Don Juan Lamberto, second edition, corrected. London: J. Brudenell for Henry Marsh, 1661, sig. Lr. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. cat and dog, n.

Swift, Jonathan. A Compleat Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation. Dublin: George Faulkner, 1738, 79. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

———. “A Description of a City Shower.” Miscellanies. London: Benjamin Motte, 1728, 17–18. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Tréguer, Pascal. “The Authentic Origin of ‘To Rain Cats and Dogs.’” Wordhistories.net, 23 June 2016.

———. Comment (4 November 2013). Liberman, Anatoly. “Etymological gleanings for October 2013.” OUPblog, 30 October 2013.

Photo credit: David Wilton, 2022.

threshold

A threshold

26 December 2022

Threshold is a word that English inherited from Proto-Germanic with cognates in German, Icelandic, Swedish, and Danish. The compound comes from two roots. The thresh- comes from a verb meaning to tread or step; in Present-Day English to thresh a cereal crop is to separate the grain from the chaff by trampling or beating it. The -hold comes from a Germanic suffix that designates a tool or instrument. We also see the suffix in the word needle, but in the case of threshold metathesis—a reordering of the phonemes—has occurred, with the / l / and the / d / swapping places.

So, a threshold is a thing that is stepped upon, that is the bottom sill of a doorway or entrance to a building.

Here it appears in the Old English translation of Exodus 12:22:

& dyppað isopan sceaf on ðam blode ðe is on ðam ðrexwolde, & sprengaþ on ðæt oferslege & on ægðrum gedyre, he forgæð þæs huses duru & ne læt slean nanne man on eowrum husum.

(& dip a sheaf of hyssop in the blood that is on the threshold, & sprinkle [it] on the lintel & on each doorpost, he will pass by the door of these houses & will let no one be slain in your houses.)

Most present-day English versions translate this as basin or bowl instead of threshold, which makes more sense in context. The Hebrew word saph can mean either threshold or basin. The Latin Vulgate translates it as limen, or threshold, and the Old English version is translating from the Latin.

Threshold can also be used figuratively to mean a starting point or a border to be crossed. This figurative use also dates to Old English. From the Old English translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, in a passage where Herebald is speaking of his master, John of Beverley:

Forðon þe he mæc, þæs ðe ic cweðe, from deaðes þirscwalde wæs acegende, & mec to lifes wege mid his gebede & blætsunge gelædde.

(Because he, so to speak, recalled me from death’s threshold, & led me to life’s way with his prayers and blessings.)

Þirscwalde (threshold) translates limine in Bede’s original Latin.

There is a specious bit of internet lore floating about that badly misstates the origin of threshold. I haven’t seen it circulating lately, but it being the internet such things never die. It claims that “thresh” was placed on the bare floor and a block of wood, the threshold, would hold the thresh in when the door was opened. Presumably, whoever invented this explanation misunderstood the action of threshing wheat and assumed that thresh was straw. It’s a reasonable off-the-cuff guess if one does not know etymology or the meaning of thresh, but it is just plain wrong.

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Sources:

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors, eds. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1969, 5.6, 466.

———. The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, part 1, vol. 2. Thomas Miller, trans. and ed. Early English Text Society, OS 96. London: Oxford UP, 1891, 5.6, 398.

Exodus 12:22. Crawford, S.J., ed. The Old English Version of the Heptateuch. Early English Text Society, OS 160. London: Oxford UP, 1969, 245.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2021, s.v. threshold, n., thresh, v.; September 2003, s.v. needle, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. bold, n.

Photo credit: Palagiri Rama krishna Reddy, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.  

third degree

Poster for the 1919 silent film The Third Degree

23 December 2022

There are many types of third degree. In many contexts, the phrase is simply a collocation of words designating a classification by stages, as in third-degree burn, the worst type of burn. But in law enforcement slang, the third degree refers to a police interrogation that involves torture. Usually, it is difficult to pin down the exact origin of a slang term, but in this case we can trace it to the New York City Police Department of the late nineteenth century and the methods employed by then Chief of Detectives Thomas F. Byrnes.

Byrnes labeled his interrogation technique the third degree, a name he apparently took from Freemasonry. Admission to the highest level, or third degree, of Masonry involves a ritual questioning that includes simulated violence. References to the third degree of Masonry date to at least the 1770s.

But it would be Byrnes who labeled his own brand of interrogation as the third degree. We have this account that appeared in the New York Tribune of 5 February 1883 of the arrest of several men who allegedly committed burglaries and then called in fire alarms to the locations they had robbed:

The Central Office detectives under the direction of Inspector Byrnes on Saturday arrested the gang of men who have been for two years sending out false fire alarms. They are all young, their ages ranging from seventeen to twenty-three years. When taken to Police Headquarters and put through what Inspector Byrnes styled “the third degree of initiation,” or “pumping process,” they all confessed their guilt.

I have not been able to determine if Byrnes was a Freemason, but his use of initiation here would seem to be an allusion to the Masonic ritual.

And there is this somewhat more detailed description of Bryne’s third degree in the New York Herald of 23 March 1887. The article does not specifically allege torture, strongly hints at it. The prisoner, Peter J. Inglis, was accused of murder and of shooting at two police officers, so one might expect the police to be rather unforgiving:

BYRNES’ THIRD DEGREE

Two Mysterious Prisoners Under Inquisition at Police Headquarters—Was Inglis One?

When Inspector Byrnes subjects a suspected criminal to the moral rack and thumbscrews in his private confessional at Police Headquarters he calls it putting the candidate through the “third degree.” It is a sort of hypnotic process, and real criminals seldom resist it.

The chief of detectives operated on two subjects last night. They were brought to his room by Detective Sergeants King and O’Connor. One was a tall slender young man who closely resembled Peter J. Inglis, and the other a large stout woman clad in a dark velvet dress and wearing a brocade shawl. At different times during the night, and after the prisoners had passed several hours in the gloomy dungeons below, they were brought up stairs one at a time.

Detectives O’Connor and King assisted in working the “third degree.” The young man was brought up and down again, but the woman was only afforded a single interview. She was led down stairs crying and when the bolts had been sprung on her cell her screams could be heard throughout the entire building.

What were they arrested for or the nature of the confession they had made? Inspector Byrnes had nothing to say. He looked cross as he drew his coat collar about his neck and started, as he said, for home. He admitted, however, that he had been giving the caged birds “the usual course,” but would not remain long enough to give the reporters a chance to try “third degree” hypnotism on him.

When the inspector’s doorbell was rung, an hour or so afterward, the servant said that Mr. Byrnes was not at home, and she did not expect him until very late.

Another article in the Herald the following day doesn’t use the term but again hints at torture through the use of euphemism:

Inspector Byrnes was as silent as the grave yesterday regarding the mysterious subjects he “hypnotized” the previous night. Still, it was learned that the young man thrice lead into the “confessional” was Peter J. Inglis, who the Brooklyn police think is the Weeks murderer. The returns of the Detective Bureau show that Inglis was the only young man locked up in the Police Central Office for several hours on Tuesday night. No record could be found, however, of the woman who was led sobbing and screaming down to the cell by Detectives King and O’Connor.

“On what charge was this weeping woman arrested?” asked a HERALD reporter of Inspector Byrnes yesterday.

The Inspector looked daggers at the reporter and scowled. Then he curtly replied:—“That woman came to see me about her wayward son. Of course she would weep under the circumstances”—and the Inspector strode away quickly.

Third degree implies that there are defined stages of interrogation, but in practice this is not the case. The phrase simply denotes police brutality during questioning.

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Sources:

“Arrest of a Gang of Burglars. Their Capture by Inspector Byrnes.” New York Tribune, 5 February 1883, 5. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Byrnes’ Mysterious Methods.” New York Herald, 24 March 1887, 64. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Byrnes’ Third Degree.” New York Herald, 23 March 1887, 4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v. third degree, n., third degree, v.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. third degree, n. and adj.

Preston, William. Illustrations of Masonry. London: Brother J. Williams, 1772, 205. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Image credit: 1919, Vitagraph Company. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.

swan song

Two swans in a pond

19 December 2022

A swansong is the final work or performance of an artist. The word comes from the belief that just before dying a swan, a bird not known for its song, will utter one beautiful melody. The phrase doesn’t appear in English until the sixteenth century, but the belief dates to antiquity.

Ovid, for instance, references the belief in Book 14 of the Metamorphoses in describing the death of Caieta, the wet-nurse of Aeneas:

ultimus adspexit Thybris luctuque viaque
fessam et iam longa ponentem corpora ripa.
illic cum lacrimis ipso modulata dolore
verba sono tenui maerens fundebat, ut olim
carmina iam moriens canit exequialia cycnus; 

(Tiber was last to see her, weary with grief and journeying, laying her body down on his wide banks. There, with tears, her grief set to music, she poured out her mournful words in feeble tones, just as the swan, in dying, sometimes sings a funeral song.)

Chaucer, in the late fourteenth century, also references the myth, although like Ovid he does not use the word or exact phrase. From the ending of the poem Anelida and Arcite, about a jilted lover:

But as the swan, I have herd seyd ful yore,
Ayeins his deth shal singen his penaunce,
So singe I here my destinee or chaunce,
How that Arcite Anelida so sore
Hath thirled with the poynt  of remembraunce.

(But like the swan, I have heard said of yore,
Facing his death shall sing his penance,
So sing I here my destiny or fate,
How that Arcite so sorely
Has stabbed Anelida with the point of remembrance.)

As for the term swansong itself, that is in place by 1597, when it appears in William Warner’s Albion’s England:

But now must end our Swan-song, now the Swan himselfe must end,
Euen he, that toyld such tedious Seas his Countries weale to mend,
Returning Homewards, neere at Home, euen on the Scottish Cost,
Did wracke, and those aboord his Ship then perished for most.

Swansong is a compound that was most likely formed in English, although it appears in European languages at about the same time. German has Schwanengesang from 1561 and Middle French chant du cycne from 1546 in reference to the swan’s singing, although use of those terms to refer to an artist’s final work come later than the English. How these parallel developments influenced the English term, or vice versa, is anyone’s guess.

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Sources:

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “Anelida and Arcite.” The Riverside Chaucer, third edition, Larry D. Benson, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987, lines 346–50, 381.

Ovid. Metamorphoses, vol. 2 of 2, books 9–15 (Ovid vol. 4 of 6), second edition. Loeb Classical Library 43. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984, 14.426–30, 330.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2021, s.v. swansong, n.

Warner, William. Albions England. London: Widow Orwin for Ioan Broome, 1597, 11.65, 280. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Photo credit: Marek Szczepanek, 2005. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

station wagon / estate car / shooting brake

A 1954 Studebaker Conestoga station wagon

12 December 2022

[Updated 18 December 2022 with the 1914 citation of estate car and with the commentary on shooting brake.]

A station wagon, as we know it today, is an automobile that in addition to two (or more) rows of passenger seating, has a large storage area in the back with a rear door for loading and unloading. The name comes from the idea that the car is well suited for transporting people and luggage to and from railway stations. The name is American in origin and predates the automobile, being first applied to horse-drawn carriages used for that purpose.

There is an obsolete sense of station wagon that dates from the U.S. Civil War era. This sense of station wagon is a horse-drawn carriage carrying equipment for use as a mobile telegraph station. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary of this sense is from 1868, a few years after the war ended, but it’s a good guess that the term was in use during the war. But this sense doesn’t figure into our current use of the term.

The sense of horse-drawn carriages for transporting people with luggage appears only a year later than the telegraph sense. And the immediate context indicates that the station wagon is not being used for trips to and from a railroad station. Instead, it is being used to transport people and luggage on a tour of Turkey. From the Christian Mirror of 29 June 1869

Here we attended to fresh supplies, and also fitted up our station wagon which had been lodged in the city some time before. We were to take it with us, and then the ladies might be relieved from their horse-back journeying. At rather a late hour we started out of the city. When fairly out in the open plains, the ladies gave up their horses for the wagon.

So, from the very start, people were using station wagons for purposes other than what the name suggests.

Almost as soon as automobiles appeared on the scene, the designation of station wagon began to be applied to them. There is this passage from a description of an automobile show in New York City that appeared in the Electrical Review of 30 November 1900, the earliest reference to a non-horse-drawn station wagon of which I’m aware:

The Woods Motor Vehicle Company, of Chicago and New York exhibits five vehicles. It has, however, a large number of vehicles of various makes in the back of the Garden for use on the track. It shows a stanhope, station wagon, runabout, brougham and Victoria.

But these early station wagons, be they horse-drawn or automotive, were considered to be utility vehicles or light trucks. They weren’t primarily intended to carry passengers, with extra capacity for baggage. In the 1920s, however, the perception of station wagons shifted, and people began to consider them more as passenger, or even pleasure, vehicles. We can see this shift in a 24 October 1922 article in the New York Times on a change in the New York state tax laws that classified station wagons as personal, rather than commercial, vehicles:

Thousands of dollars may be lost to the State but saved by automobile owners as the result of a decision just handed down by the Appellate Division, holding that the common type of automobile known as the “suburban” or “station wagon” is not a commercial truck but a passenger car, and as such is entitled to the lower rate collected by the Automobile Bureau.

[…]

“These cars are used by the thousands, especially in the country, for transporting people and for bringing packages from stores, and carrying baggage to and from the railroad station,” said Mr. Zabriskie, “and they have always been licensed as such until this year.”

[…]

In his decision, Justice Dike held that while the station wagons were frequently filled to overflowing with bundles and bags they were subject to the personal use of their owners only and were not used for transportation of passengers or freight for pay, hence were not “commercial” vehicles. Granting the application for a peremptory mandamus order, the Court classified the vehicle by saying:

“The car in question is a well-known type, and, as stated in the brief of the petitioners, ‘it is in fact known by its acquaintances simply as the Ford, and has not even been endowed with any pet name or nickname such as facetious owners frequently bestow on their flivvers, except when it refuses to function, when it is sometimes called by other names appropriate to the occasion.’”

That is the North American history of the car and its name. In Britain, such cars are labeled as estate cars. An early description of an estate car can be seen in an article in Country Life magazine from 20 May 1914. The vehicle described in the article, however, is more akin to a light truck (lorry) or bus than the estate car of today, which is built on a passenger car chassis. The article also indicates why it is called an estate car, that is because it is useful for various transportation and hauling needs around a country estate:

While a chassis of suitable power built by any first-class manufacturer of industrial vehicles is naturally quite suited to form the basis of a country estate car, some makers have specialized more than others in this direction. For example, Messrs. Commercial Cars, Limited, many years ago brought out a special vehicle which they called the “Norwich Convertible Country House and Estate Car.” A brief description of the capabilities of this machine will be interesting as indicating a type very likely to suit the needs of many landowners. The “Norfolk” car is fitted with detachable bodies, which can be interchanged without the use of any running gear or other mechanism beyond a sling and pulley suspended from the ceiling of the coach-house. As a station ’bus it carries up to about twelve or fourteen passengers and some 15cwt. of luggage. As a shooting brake it is fitted with gun racks and cartridge lockers, and provides very comfortable accommodation for a fair-sized party. In general estate work it carries from 30cwt. to 2 tons of produce or goods of any kind at a very reasonable cost in a simple form of lorry body.

The above article also uses the term shooting brake, another very British term, which the OED dates to 1912. A shooting brake is a variant on the estate car used for hunting, capable of carrying hunters and their dogs, weapons, and other equipment. Like the estate car, the shooting brake has been downsized over the years. Once a truck fitted with seats in the back, present-day versions resemble what is now called a hatchback, only they are marked as shooting brakes by having only two doors. These later shooting brakes tend to be luxury vehicles, marketed toward the elites who hunt on British country estates; Aston Martin, for example, makes shooting brakes. Shooting brakes have come a long way from their lorry origins.

The shooting in shooting brake is easy enough to figure out, but brake is mysterious to most present-day speakers. The explanation is simple enough. A brake or brake is a large carriage intended primarily for breaking young horses, but which could be put various other uses around an estate.

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Sources:

“An Automobile Show in New York.” The Electrical Review, 47.1201, 30 November 1900, 862–63. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Cole, R.M. “Mirror Correspondence. Erzroom, Eastern Turkey, May 5th, 1869.” Christian Mirror (Portland, Maine), 29 June 1869, 1. America’s Historical Newspapers.

“One Vehicle—A Fleet in Itself” (advertisement). Daily Telegraph (London), 7 October 1937, 18. Gale Primary Sources: The Telegraph Historical Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2012, s.v. station wagon, n.; second edition, 1989, estate, n., shooting, n., break, n.2.

“Recent Developments in Estate Motors.” Country Life, 30 May 1914, 56. Internet Archive.

“‘Station Wagon’ Not a Commercial Truck; Pay Only Pleasure Car License, Court Rules.” New York Times, 24 October 1922, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Tulinius, Kári. Comment on “Station Wagon/Estate Car.” LanguageHat (blog), 17 December 2022.

Image credit: Nick Wilson, 2019. Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1954_Studebaker_Conestoga.jpg Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.