Jeremy Butterfield's Blog, page 2

For fun. Where to put the comma in the Yorkshire abbreviated article.

Vernacular norms (guest post by Joan Beal)

Sting-Nettle Day

Have you ever been stung by a stinging nettle?

I bet you have.

I’m sure I was as a youngster – more than once. And I’m equally sure I learned by the age of five or six how to identify and apply a dock leaf that would soothe and ease the sting.

That piece of inherited plant lore is the lone survivor (in my case) of the extensive medicine chest, figuratively speaking, or pharmacopeia that country people once held in their heads.

Nowadays we’re largely urbanised – about 85 per cent of people in the UK live in towns and cities. Nevertheless, farmland – which generally implies a rural or semi-rural setting – still accounts for 70 per cent of the UK’s total land. So it’s no surprise that many ancestral country traditions are still going strong, such as well-dressing, the media-attention-grabbing cheese-rolling – and the rather overlooked Sting-Nettle Day. Apparently, Sting-Nettle Day falls on 2 May in Sussex and in Devon on 3 May, following Kissing Day. An authoritative compendium of folk traditions notes that in 1880 in a Devonshire village (Bovey Tracey) all the children were provided with a nettle or bunch of nettles with which they would merrily flog each other.

History does not record why, and the origins of the Nettle Days in Sussex and Devon are a mystery lost in the proverbial mists of time.

But one reason must surely be that nettles once supplemented the diet of country people who struggled to put food on the table. My research tells me nettles are at their tenderest in March and April; they should never be eaten after May Day because that’s when the Devil makes his shirt from them. I’m told nettle soup is delicious, and I heard the other day about a wild garlic and nettle risotto. You can find plentiful advice on how to use nettles in your cooking here.  

Apart from their role as a dietary supplement, another reason stinging nettles are honoured in this way must be their medicinal and health-giving properties. The leaves contain bone-building minerals, not to mention a wealth of vitamins. Nettles are also anti-inflammatory and, though it may seem paradoxical, have analgesic or pain-relieving properties. Some people swear by nettle tea as balm for arthritic pain.

The species of nettle we’re talking about here is Urtica dioica. The Urtica part is a direct borrowing from the Latin urtīca, ‘nettle’, which in turn is from ūrere, ‘to burn’. That makes sense. Ouch! Nettles do make your skin feel as if it’s burning. And that burning is expressed in the prefix to the Danish word for stinging nettles, brændenælder, Danish using the same verb for ‘to burn’ and ‘to sting’. That same Latin word urtīca is also the root of the technical name for nettle rash, urticaria.

The reason nettles burn and sting, of course, is that evolution has endowed them with this self-defence mechanism to deter herbivores from munching on them.

The word nettle is one we’ve inherited from Old English (OE) netele, related to Old High German nazza (Modern German Nessel). Given its medicinal properties, it’s not surprising the nettle first appears in OE writing above all in leech books, namely, books containing medical remedies and diagnoses, leech here being the OE word for a doctor or healer. Dock too is OE, docce, related to words in Middle Dutch and Old Danish.

Ultimately, nettle may, like net, be related to an Indo-European base word meaning ‘to bind, to tie together’ given that nettles have been used for weaving. Who knows whether the story mentioned earlier of the Devil weaving his shirt from nettles isn’t a folk memory of this?

An early verbing

Whatever the word’s ultimate etymology, it’s an earlyish example of verbing, that is, the conversion of a noun into a verb. By the first quarter of the fifteenth century, it was being used as a verb denoting ‘to beat or sting someone with nettles’. Using that ‘ouch’ literal meaning non-literally, Shakespeare has Harry Hotspur in Henry IV Part 1 declare, ‘Why look you, I am whipt & scourg’d with rods, / Netled, and stung with Pismires [ants]’.

In a perhaps more famous phrase in the same play, Shakespeare has the noun nettle come from Hotspur’s lips: ‘Out of this nettle danger, we plucke this flower safetie.’

It’s not hard to see how the ‘ouch’ of physical nettles endowed the verb with the meaning ‘to irritate, to annoy, to vex’, a use that quite probably arose at roughly the same time as the literal meaning was coined. The same metaphor of a stinging object causing irritation is what underlies the analogous verb to needle – though the noun needle had to wait till the nineteenth century to be verbed in that way.

Nettles being an integral part of country life and lore, it was inevitable they should be honoured with an idiomatic phrase or several. To say someone ‘has pissed on a nettle’ was a down-to-earth, highly graphic but now obsolete way of saying someone was in an extremely bad temper. ‘Sitting on nettles’ in Scots refers to being on tenterhooks in expectation of something.

And then there’s the incantatory rhyme or spell recited as you apply the dock leaf to the hurt. It has several variants such as ‘In dock, out nettle, don’t let the blood settle!’ or ‘Nettle out, dock in, Dock remove the nettle sting.’ The to and fro of the spell then made it a byword for inconstancy or fickleness such that Chaucer could write in his Troilus and Criseyde, ‘But kanstow pleyen raket to and fro, / Netle In, dokke out, now this, now þat Pandare,’ (But can you play racquets [tennis] to and fro, / Nettle in, dock out, now this, now that, Pandar).

Nettle poems

And talking of poetry, one might suppose nettles to be meagre subject matter for poetry. However, there are at least three classics that take the plant as their ostensible topic and develop it in different ways. Vernon Scannell’s Nettles, a GCSE text, examines the father–son relationship with a wealth of military metaphors. I particularly love his description of the nettles as ‘that regiment of hate behind the shed’. Tall Nettles by the Edwardian Poet Edward Thomas speaks of change, decay and unexpected beauty; and Neil Munro’s nostalgic Nettles is about the Highland Clearances. On a lighter note, there’s even a whole book of poems about nettles, one of which includes the cheery phrase ‘when climbing styles in optimistic shorts’, a classic case of the transferred epithet: the shorts are not optimistic, their wearers are.

As are we all, in the British climate, when we don our shorts. And if and when you wear them, do try to steer clear of Urtica dioica.

This post contains the text of a post Collins Dictionaries commissioned from me for their dictionaries site here.

Japanese words in English

Here’s a pub quiz question for you: What’s the only (real) country that is also a verb?

Have you got it yet?

I’ll put you out of your misery. It’s Japan.

Collins English Dictionary defines the verb as ‘to lacquer with japan or any similar varnish’. And ‘japan’ as a noun long since verbed is ‘a lacquer or varnish giving a hard, glossy finish’.

So much history in one little verbing. Japanese art has influenced European art profoundly, principally in two spurts: from the mid-seventeenth century for a century and a half or so, when the import trade run mostly by Portuguese or Dutch merchants quenched the almost unquenchable European thirst for decorative pottery, such as imari ware with its strong blues and reds and elaborate gilt, or kakiemon, and lacquered objects and objets de vertu such as those fascinatingly conceived carved objects somewhat demeaned by being described as ‘toggles’, netsukes. And second, from the mid-nineteenth century, after Japan re-opened its borders in 1868, after which in Britain the Aesthetic Movement became enthralled by Japanesery (1885) or its more chic Frenchified cousin, japonaiserie (1896), that is, the craze for all things Japanese when it comes to interior decoration and the decorative arts.

By 1688 there was already a British ‘Treatise of Japaning’, telling furniture makers how to B&Q it; a century and a half later Jane Austen still feels the ripples of that first wave when she makes Catherine in Northanger Abbey fall almost Gothickly under the spell of a cabinet that ‘was not absolutely ebony and gold; but it was japan, black and yellow japan of the handsomest kind’.

Later in the nineteenth century, Van Gogh, among many of his contemporary artists, copied and was influenced by Japanese prints by the master printmakers Hiroshige, Hokusai and others, those ‘pictures of the floating world’ as the translation of the Japanese ukiyo-e has it, the area of cities, especially Edo (now Tokyo) where theatricality met immorality and was immortalised in magisterial woodblocks that the Japanese general public could afford.

As an example of the Japaneseing aesthetic craze, in the first chapter of Oscar Wilde’s largely indigestible The Picture of Dorian Gray, the birds in flight that cast shadows across the heavy tussore silk drapes of the painter’s decadent studio produce ‘a kind of momentary Japanese effect’. (This link takes you to an exquisite seventeenth-century piece of Japanese export lacquer in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.)

You say manga, I say ikebana.

Which Japanese words one is conscious of as affecting English will surely depend on age. (Sorry for the truism, which applies across language: but truisms are called that because they’re true, if hackneyed.) For people younger than me, it’s manga and anime culture that will sit atop their mental furniture if asked to name a Japanese word in English.

For me, the resonances of Japanese words are rather different. For instance, off the top of my head, kimono springs to mind. But earlier than kimono in my memory is reading about origami, the art of artistic paper folding, in a Reader’s Digest Christmas Annual or some such. I think I managed to beguile some time by creating a lopsided and flightless bird but failed miserably to achieve anything more aerial, ‘cack-handed’ being my middle name. Much later, when introduced to the gentleman who did ikebana for the Emperor and the Court, I was impressed that a full-time profession could be made out of that art of highly artistic and intellectual flower arranging.

A simple soup

Landing with a bump back down to earth, in my kitchen cabinet I have miso sachets ready to make a delicious noodle soup whenever I manage to kid myself I’m being healthy. (Though talking about miso may feel vaguely modern, in fact it’s one of the oldest Japanese loanwords in English.) Some noodles, spring onions, soy sauce, a finely sliced mushroom or two, pak choi (which is a Chinese word) if you have it, a plonk of sherry, and you can create a soothing thin broth of what Nigella calls ‘templefood.’

I digress.

With food in mind – and food is always in my mind, I’m notorious for it among my friends – it’s worth looking at some of the staples of Japanese food now entrenched in the Anglosphere. You’d probably have to have been living under that proverbial rock not to know what sushi refers to.

If panko breadcrumbs can be considered food, they’re the second Japanese food item that graces my kitchen cabinet. I don’t know what you do with them, but I tend to use them to leaven the day-glo-orange breadcrumbs you can use to bread haddie and the like for frying.

I’m a fairly middle-of-the-road cook, with the occasional velleity of upping my game. What mostly sets me back, TBH, is the prep time that chefs routinely ascribe to their recipes: their ‘ten minutes’ translates into three quarters of an hour minimum. That said, I’ve often ogled jars of yuzu in the supermarket but never bought one, mostly because I thought it was a lot to pay for an exiguous quantity of something I couldn’t guarantee I’d ever use. (Clap your hands if you’ve been there too, not just with yuzu.) So prized is this fragrant fruit, that I understand it’s a thing in Japan to have a bath filled with it during the winter.

But we don’t need to be as exotic as yuzu to think of everyday ‘British’ foods (emphatic air quotes round ‘British’ here) with a Japanese twist that we’re all now mostly familiar with: think ramen, think udon, think soba. Two of those are homespun Japanese words, but ramen comes from the Chinese for ‘to pull’ and ‘noodles’.

And then there are gyoza dumplings, yakitori chicken, edamame beans, that ubiquitous mouth-tingling wasabi paste, and so forth. This is a blog post, not a culinary dictionary, so I won’t go on. Except that …

overarching all these bits and bobs of imported Japanese food culture must sit the word umami, for the fifth basic taste – along with sweet, sour, bitter and salty – that we didn’t have a name for or even know existed until someone premiered the word in the Japanese journal of psychology Shinrigaku Kenkyu in 1963. Since then it’s gone from strength to strength – metaphorically, you understand. I don’t think there are yet units to measure the intensity of umaminess, unlike, say, the Scoville Heat Units used for chillis.

Moving off the topic of food now but still in the domestic sphere, you could have knocked me down with a feather when I found out that the aucuba, ornamental laurel, is not Latin. Well, it is and it isn’t. It’s Modern Latin based apparently on Japanese words for ‘(being) green’, ‘leaf’, and possibly ‘tree’.

A touching tale

Still in the domestic realm, the akita is a rather handsome breed of large dog, named after a region of Northern Japan. As the American Kennel Club notes, akitas are ‘famous for their dignity, courage and loyalty’ and are ‘hard-wired for protecting those they love’. Indeed. Who could not be moved by the story of Hachikō, who every day for ten years went to the railway station to await the arrival of his master, a professor, on his commute home from university. But his master had died at work, never to return alive on the train.

If you’re wondering why I haven’t as yet said much about the history of the words I’ve mentioned, the disappointing truth is that they don’t mostly have exotic stories to tell. They’re a bit ‘it does what it says on the tin’ words – absolutely no disrespect intended. To illustrate my point, tempura means ‘fried food’, sushi means ‘sour rice’ and yuzu just means, possibly, ‘fruit of tree’ – though it might come from Middle Chinese. Kimono means ‘clothing’, from kiru, ‘to wear’ + mono, ‘thing’. Saké, however, might just possibly be derived form a word meaning ‘to prosper’. I’ll drink to that.

Zen and the art of pottery

Chinese culture, religion and language have massively influenced Japan from the first millennium BCE onwards. In fact, even that quintessential financial symbol of Japan, the currency, the yen, is from Chinese: it’s the Japanese en, which comes from Chinese yuan, ‘circular object, dollar’. Then there’s Buddhism – think Zen and koans, those riddles such as ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’; art forms like pottery – think raku and ‘studio’ potters like Bernard Leach; and, finally, the written language, the complexities of which I’ll spare you. Suffice it to say that romaji, the Roman alphabet used to transcribe Japanese into an alphabetic form you and I can read, combines Japanese roma ‘Roman’ with ji ‘character’.

Some imports from Japan hide their ancestry. If we talk about the head honcho, we’re unknowingly using the Japanese hanchō, ‘squad leader’. Tycoons are literally ‘great leaders’, from Japanese taikun, from Chinese ta, ‘great’, + chün, ‘ruler’. And of course, emojis have nothing to do with the e– of email or emotion and everything to do with Japanese e, ‘picture’, + moji, ‘letter’. Fortunately, the rebarbative business speak ‘to open the kimono’, meaning ‘to open the books’, seems to have died a death.

After all this japonaiserie, it’s really time for me to go and meditate on my tatami mat before reclining on my futon and drifting off mentally into that gorgeous ‘floating world’ I mentioned earlier. Tatami mats constitute a standard measure influencing the size of traditional Japanese homes and, incidentally, even influenced Bauhaus aesthetics.

The holly and the ivy: wonderful words for Christmas plants

Which plants, I wonder, gentle reader, do you associate with Christmas?

IYAM, certain plants just shout ‘Christmas’, don’t they? Well, perhaps some are a bit shoutier than others. The traditional holly, ivy, mistletoe and winterberry are on the subtler side, while on the brasher wing we find Christmas cactus and poinsettias. And there are other plants which come into prominence at this time of year, especially – for me, at any rate – cyclamens and amaryllis.

‘When they are both full grown’

It’s hardly surprising that historically people have associated holly and ivy with this time of year, hence with Christmas. After all, Christmas falls very near the shortest day of the ‘bleak midwinter’, when trees are leafless, few birds sing, colourful perennials have long since gone over, and sunshine is a scarce commodity. So we are crying out for Mother Nature to help us lighten and brighten up the surrounding greyness and grimness.

‘Of all the trees that are in the wood’

Holly, ivy and mistletoe are all three evergreens, and because they’re evergreen, they easily come to symbolise rebirth or eternal life. Holly also produces berries** at this time of year, thereby providing food for hungry birds, while their cheerful scarlet or crimson brightens any wreath, set off as they are against the glossy holly foliage.

In fact, so popular are mistletoe berries with one bird species that its names – the ‘common’ one and the scientific one – are drawn from the plant: the mistle thrush, whose zoological name Turdus viscivorus makes the same link, viscivorus meaning ‘that devours mistletoe’. Mistletoe is interesting scientifically speaking in that it’s what’s called hemiparasitic, which means it both photosynthesises and derives nourishment from its host, which in the UK is often a poor long-suffering apple tree.

Though the custom of stealing a kiss from someone under the ‘mystic mistletoe’ might seem as old as the hills, and though mistletoe has been included in Christmas decorations at least since the sixteenth century, the earliest reference to kissing under it is as late as 1813. A nineteenth-century letter writer to a newspaper described the practice as ‘the mirth-exciting challenger of youth and the test of maiden coyness’.

Image by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash.

‘The holly bears the crown’

Christmas in origin was strategically timed at this time of year to replace pagan midwinter festivals. One such was the Roman Saturnalia, where holly boughs, among other greenery, were carried. The carol ‘Deck the halls with boughs of holly’ with its very jolly ‘Fa-la-la -la-la | La-la, la, la’ is an example of a UK collaboration: the music is sixteenth-century Welsh, the words are by a Scotsman.

Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable suggests it’s unlucky to bring holly into the house before Christmas Eve. Which reminds me. In the dim and distant past (including my childhood), weren’t Christmas decorations and Christmas trees only ever put up and decorated on Christmas Eve? Actually, in the even dimmer and distanter past, say a century and a half ago, ‘Christmas decorations’ would have meant greenery and candles and nothing more.

The Christian link between holly and Christmas goes back to mediaeval times, and in the carol with the supremely hummable or singable tune I’ve scattered through this piece that symbolism is made explicit. For example, the white blossom represents the purity of the Saviour, according to Christian tradition, while the colour of the berries, ‘as red as any blood’, symbolises the blood Jesus shed on the cross.

Though the carol may sound in words and music almost as old as time itself, it was created in its current form only in the early twentieth century. In fact, it was that doyen of English folk-music history Cecil Sharp who discovered it in Chipping Camden in the Cotswolds long before that area had turned into London-at-the-weekend.

An ancient hangover cure

As for ivy, in classical times Bacchus/Dionysus and his satyrs are sometimes depicted sporting wreaths of ivy because it was thought to prevent drunkenness. That tradition continued into mediaeval times, partly strengthened by the observation and symbolism that the ivy plant often chokes grape vines. The renowned herbalist Nicholas Culpeper opined: ‘The speediest cure for a surfeit by wine is to drink a draught of the same liquor wherein a handful of bruised ivy leaves have been boiled.’

Anyone game to give it a try? After you, madam or sir.

Ivy also represents fidelity because of the way it stubbornly clings onto its host tree. In Victorian flower lore it represented, apart from fidelity, wedded love, friendship and affection. Anyone who’s ever tried removing ivy from a stone or brickwork wall it’s faithfully clinging to will have discovered a whole new world of meaning in the adjective clingy.

Perhaps many of us focus on holly, ivy and mistletoe at Christmastide,  but traditionally many other evergreens were used, such as box, laurel, rosemary, cypress and yew – in fact, ‘whatsoever the season of the year afforded to be green’.

As regards ivy’s origins, it comes from Old English īfig, īfegnwhich morphed into Middle English ivi, yve, ivye, etc. and is related to the Old High German ebawi, ebah for ‘ivy’, from which Modern German Efeu derives. Its original sense was possibly ‘climber’.

What’s in a name?

We may make wreaths of holly, ivy and other greenery to decorate our front doors, and hang mistletoe strategically as botanical panders to a stolen snog, but the plants that brighten our spirits most are not ‘native’. Take the case of Christmas cactus, so named because it produces its carmine, cerise or vermilion flowers at this time of year. It’s one species in a genus of less than ten tropical plants from South Brazil. My top gardening tip, vouched for by the BBC’s Gardeners’ Question Time, is do not overwater. Although as tropical plants they like moisture, they also like it to drain off quickly as they hang on epiphytically to their host.

It’s as well we call it Christmas cactus: its botanical name would empty the shops. Like so many hundreds, if not thousands, of plants, it immortalises the name of the person who first classified it, namely a Monsieur Schlumberger, and one popular variety is Schlumbergera bridgesii. Similarly, it is a Mr Joel Roberts Poinsett we have to thank, ultimately, for the popularity of poinsettias. He introduced them to the USA from Mexico in the nineteenth century.

Talking of plants names after people, wisteria looks as if it was named after a certain person surnamed Wister. In fact, it was classified by a Mr Wistar, an American anatomist (1761–1818). The English botanist who named the genus after him misspelled his name, and the mistake has stuck ever since.

And talking of mistakes, mistletoe too owes its current shape to a misapprehension. The Old English was misteltān, mistel = ‘mistletoe’ and tān = ‘twig’. It entered Middle English in the form mistelta: people chopped off the letter –n, thinking it was the plural of the word for ‘toe’. Later, mistelta morphed to mistelto, and later still to mistletoe.

As I pen this, sitting on the windowsill of my study is my favourite cachepot containing two cyclamens. You’ll surely know the plant, those compact little beauties with variegated crinkly leaves and delicate flowers in shades of pink or violet with upswept petals that market stalls and garden centres are chockablock with at this time of year. Cyclamens do a grand job of providing heart-warming colour ‘in the bleak midwinter’, but beware: they won’t survive long outside, as I’ve found from experience. It’s their cousins, Cyclamen coum, which can go outside and peek cheerily through any snow. The indoor variety is Cyclamen persicum, ‘Persian cyclamen’, reflecting its Middle Eastern habitat, while the word cyclamen embodies the Greek for ‘circle’, with reference to the shape of the plant’s tuber.

Sitting on my bedroom windowsill is an amaryllis, which hopefully will survive my erratic watering and go on to produce its magnificent blooms in a few weeks. It’s already showing a tiny sliver of green leaf, so that makes me feel optimistic.

Whatever Christmas decorations and plants adorn your home – or none – I’ll take this opportunity to wish you and your loved ones the very warmest greetings of the season.

** Holly berries are technically drupes because they contain a stone, aka ‘stony endocarp’.

NB: I have reposted on my site the post I wrote for Collins Dictionaries, published on their site on 14 December, and slightly tweaked here.

Celebrating Advent

‘The Lord Will Come and not be Slow‘
(John Milton)

Ah, Advent! The season when children’s faces and some adults’ faces, too – mine, anyway – light up while, day by day, they open whatever kind of Advent calendar has come their way. I vividly remember, aged four, my first, sparkly one, so any calendar today is a fast track down nostalgia lane.

Advent in Church terms begins on the Sunday nearest 30 November and covers the period from then until Christmas Eve, while in popular use it starts on 1 December. It refers to Jesus’s forthcoming arrival into the world and also to his eventual return one day in the Second Coming. (I say a bit about the word’s origins at the end.)

In a largely post-Christian Britain, it’s probably fair to say that many will experience greater excitement over Advent calendars than over the event Advent leads up to. In fact, some Advent calendars long ago morphed from winter scenes revealed by opening tiny doors, or even the simple serotonin- and dopamine-induced high of chocolates concealed behind such doors.

Brands and retailers long ago adventjacked the calendars and turned them into an excuse for conspicuous consumption to the tune of several hundred or even several thousand pounds.

Sandro Botticelli
The Adoration of the Kings
about 1470-5
Tempera on poplar, 130.8 x 130.8 cm
Bought, 1878
NG1033
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/NG1033Where did Advent calendars start?

If this were a film about the history of Advent calendars, we would now hear the voiceover saying, ‘But it wasn’t always like that…’ and then be presented with a snow-infused shot of a Victorian family whose adorably fresh-faced and well-behaved children are gleefully opening one of the minuscule* doors to reveal a nativity scene, or angels, or reindeer, and so forth.

Then the viewer hears an ear-shattering #$@!%%!?ф¡¡16йщ3¿¿ (denoting a classic film sound effect that this scene is completely wrong).

The most likely origin of Advent calendars is touchingly domestic and certainly not British. Accounts vary, but according to one tradition the first was made by a mother in Munich for her little son to stop him asking over and over again when Christmas would come. She stuck twenty-four tiny sweets to a sheet of cardboard for her boy to eat one day at a time. According to another version, the first printed Advent calendars were produced in 1851 in Germany, but a late nineteenth-century date or even an early twentieth-century one also seems possible.

What is certainly true is that the earlier calendars featured images which children would cut out and affix to the background of the calendar. And those images were generally religious in nature, such as scenes of the Nativity. It was only in the 1920s that doorlets that could be prised open were introduced. Some calendars have twenty-four doors, some twenty-five, to include Christmas Day.

This links to a rather novel Advent calendar: a haiku per day, going through the twenty-four books of the Hebrew Bible (all of which are in the Protestant Bible).

While lavish calendars stuffed with goods may be a thing, booksellers and other outlets still stock plenty of the simpler kind. In our home, we alternate between using a calendar with doors, each revealing a bird or animal in a nostalgic winter scene, and one with an imposing Nordic stable for the reindeer where you insert them, their harnesses and accoutrements into little slots so they sit upright.

Bringing light in the darkness of winter

The origins of the Advent wreath are also German. A certain Johann Hinrich Wichern was a philanthropist who took in street children into homes he established in Hamburg. In the run-up to Christmas, he would tell them the Christmas story and every day add an extra candle to the circular holders hanging from the ceiling. Doing this was a sort of visual religious parable, answering to Jesus’s saying ‘I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.’ (John 8:12)

And in the north of the northern hemisphere, where December days are at their shortest, light has a powerful, poetic resonance. For instance, in Sweden on 13 December people celebrate the Feast of Sankta Lucia, Saint Lucy, a big part of their Advent tradition. Saint Lucy was a fourth-century martyr, and on her feast day she becomes the bringer of light in the depths of winter. In fact, her very name is based on the Latin for ‘light’, lux. In Swedish churches on 13 December, one woman representing Saint Lucy leads a group of other women, all robed in baptismal white and carrying candles, while she is crowned with a wreath of lighted candles.

And why does Saint Lucy’s day fall on 13 December? Because that was the shortest day in the Julian Calendar.

Similarly, on the theme of light, in UK churches, one candle will be lit every Sunday of the four before Christmas. In other words, religious Advent, unlike Advent calendars, doesn’t start on 1 December but on the Sunday nearest to 30 November, which this year, as it happens, is 3 December. The Church of England collect (the word is pronounced stressing the first syllable and means a short prayer said by the officiant before the bible reading) for Advent Sunday opens with this metaphor of light:

Almighty God,
give us grace to cast away the works of darkness
and to put on the armour of light

And light is the central feature of the Jewish menorah. The version with seven candles refers to the style of lamp used in the Temple. Eight candles of the version with nine candles, which is technically not a menorah but a hanukiah, signify how many days the oil burned, by miracle, in the Temple after it was recaptured by the Macabees in 164 BC, while the ninth is a “helper” candle to light the others with. Hannukah, which this year begins on 7 December, celebrates the rededication of the Temple.

***

This Advent, leading up to Christmas, should always be written with a capital A, being a proper noun. The common noun* advent, with a lower-case a, means the arrival of something or someone.

(* “common” in grammatical terms, in contrast to proper nouns. It isn’t very common, of course – not the sort of word you’d hear down the pub.)

Both versions come from the Latin adventus, which was used in Classical Latin and in the Vulgate, the fourth-century version of the Bible produced by the scholarly Saint Jerome, who is often portrayed in mediaeval and Renaissance paintings at work in his study. And adventus in turn derives from advenīre, from ad, meaning ‘to’  venire, ‘to come’. The religious use of the term in Latin is a translation of the Greek parousia (παρουσία) referring to Jesus’s second coming.

As for when the tradition of marking the lead-up to Christmas started, it was certainly in force by AD 480 and thus dates back to an early phase of the development of the Church in Europe. However, monks were enjoined to fast rather than, as we tend to, feast.

I won’t be fasting. There are too many good things to eat. Ought I to be ashamed to say that I’ll be eating panettone, a hangover from when I lived in Italy; lebkuchen, to remember my beloved German stepmother? And they will contain plenty of marzipan, cinnamon and nutmeg. And the mincemeat in mince pies goes without saying.

Whether you’re fasting or feasting, I’m sure everyone at Collins dictionaries joins me in wishing you a joyous Advent.

* I almost forgot. The original spelling is minUscule, via French from Latin, but pronunciation of that middle u as an i and also the link to mini and its compounds have conspired to produce the spelling miniscule with a central i, which Collins accepts as an alternative form. But bear in mind some people don’t.

This post is an updated version of one I wrote that was originally posted on the Collins Dictionary Langaguage Lovers site in 2022.

Monetizing the sacred. Some thoughts on a word and a meaning.

The other day, reading the very engaging Ships of Heaven, a book about a ‘curated’ [my word] selection of British cathedrals, I was struck by the author’s use of the verb ‘to monetize’.

‘Struck’ for several reasons. (Actually, four – I think – as we’ll see.) First, because the context in which they used it put the Middle Ages slap bang in your face in a way that forced me ‘to sit up and take notice’.

(I insert quotation marks round that phrase because, as the late Professor John Sinclair taught and amply illustrated, a vast amount of our language – much more than we might like to think – consists of ready-made phrases. And that is but one of thousands – or even tens of thousands.)

‘As I was saying’ before I ‘so rudely interrupted’ myself, the author is describing how in mediaeval England it would ‘hugely benefit’ a cathedral or abbey to have a saint or two of some kind to whose shrine the faithful came as pilgrims and, en passant, left a coin or two, to swell the abbatial/monastic/episcopal coffers.

After all, those cathedrals and abbeys needed loadza money for the stonemasons and master craftsmen, not to mention the stone – nor the abbot’s or bishop’s table.

The cathedral is Hereford, and its saint is St Thomas Cantilupe (nope, nothing to do with those melons: note the exact spelling), the top part of whose original shrine has been splendidly – or gaudily, according to taste – restored. The saintly bishop, also Chancellor of Oxford (eat your heart out, Chris Patten), was bishop ‘for a few short years’. (I’ll stop the quotation marks now; I think I’ve proved Prof. Sinclair’s point.)

Thomas fell out with the Archbish of Canterbury over a matter of land ownership. Falling out then wasn’t like being ‘unfriended’ on F’book. No, sirree. The AofC excommunicated him, which meant – long story short – he would have zero chance of getting into Heaven.

But our Thomas was no pussy (slang, mostly U.S.) and set out to Italy to argue his case with Pope Martin IV. There he succumbed – possibly to a batch of rancid lasagne (no, I’m just making that up) – and died at Orvieto, where, as Grahame Greene’s narrator in Travels with My Aunt quipped: ‘I would have thought he was very lucky to die in Orvieto rather than in Hereford. A small civilized place even today with a far, far better climate and an excellent restaurant in the Via Garibaldi.’

The flesh was boiled from his body and interred near Orvieto, his heart ended up in Hertfordshire, and his bones came back to Hereford to be entombed in a f**k-off shrine. (Note to self: check that funeral plan you signed up to a while back. No boiling!) And if you note a certain cynicism creeping in here, it’s all because of that ruddy monetize.

The relevant passage from the book runs like this: ‘… there was a strong desire to have him canonized, not least among the secular canons of Hereford Cathedral who knew the potential for monetizing a saintly shrine.’ (p.181, p’back)

Image: the ‘Golden Window’ or ‘Paternoster Window’ at St Laurence’s, Ludlow. Mid-1450s. Nowt to do with Cantilupe, but the easiest mediaeval image I could lay my hands on because I took it myself.

The second aspect of monetizing is, of course, the spelling. Should it be –ise or –ize? I’ve written extensively about this ‘thorny issue’ here and here and here. FWIW, its first citation in English according to the OED (1867) is in the form monetize, but that proves absolutely nothing at all: the next (1903 ) citation uses the –ise spelling. And although the word as a string of letters is as old as 1867, the meaning that concerns us here is as recent as 1998: ‘To exploit (a product, service, audience, etc.) so that it generates revenue.’ Hence, it can feel relatively novel to some people.

It’s all about eyeballs, audience acquisition… Growth lies in the ability to monetize those eyeballs.

Boston Globe 14 January c6/6

And, like so many useful additions to the English wordhoard, it’s an originally U.S. neologism as the above citation shows.

On the –ize/ise issue, it’s worth stating that Professor Lynne Murphy has shown how the –ise spelling has undergone a huge revival in British English since the 1990s, almost as a ‘badge of honour’ for being British. I’m shouting quietly here: IT’S AN ABSOLUTE NONSENSE TO THINK THAT THE -IZE SPELLING IS AN ‘AMERICAN IMPOSITION’ .

Third, what about pronunciation? I suspect most of us link it to money (‘Money makes the world go around, money, money, money, money’ etc.) and therefore pronounce the first syllable accordingly.

But, if you didn’t know the word has anything to do with money, the rules of English could suggest that first o is as in hot [ɒ]. AI would, anyway, I’m sure. As it turns out, the New English Dictionary of 1907 (the OED as we now know it) gave precisely that pronunciation: /ˈmɒnɪtaɪz/.

Fourth and finally, the shape of monetise/-ize. From 1900 until 2023 the OED records no fewer than 511 new verbs ending in the OED’s style of –ize. Taking the first ten as they appear, that is, ‘in no particular order’, hospitalize, customize, finalize, prioritize, destabilize, fantasize, randomize, contextualize, empathize and operationalize, it’s clear that the –ize suffix is clamped onto a noun or adjective base with minimum disruption, e.g. contextual + –ize, fantasy + –ize, and so forth.

Which doesn’t account for monetize. Had AI been asked to verbify money, would it have come up with monetize? I don’t think so. It would have spat out the moneyize/-se that exists in vanishingly small numbers on the interweb.  

What happened with monetize is that whoever coined it resorted to our Latin heritage and used the Latin word monēta, As the OED puts it, ‘A borrowing from Latin, combined with an English element.’

I suppose that’s in the same Latinising vein as the old-fashioned l.s.d.  or £.s.d. for ‘pounds, shilling and pence’, librae, solidi, denarii.

Finally, it tickles me more than it should (I don’t get out much) that that Latin monēta through various twists and turns ends up even in German and Danish – as, of course, in the Romance languages, including Romanian – as the word for ‘coin’: German die Münze from Old High German Muniʒʒa from Latin; Danish mønt from Middle Low German Münte. Not to mention Russian монета.

(English coin comes via Old French from the Latin cuneum, accusative, ‘wedge’. The die to stamp coins was wedge-shaped and the word transferred to the product of the die.)

Turkish delight

(This is a copy of the post I wrote for Collins Dictionaries.)

Look up the word Turkish in the Collins Dictionary and you’ll encounter several compounds that hint at the influence Turkey and its culture have exerted over the centuries. Take Turkish coffee, that mood-boosting, energy-providing short but sweet shot. Perhaps you have a Turkish rug or carpet at home, admired for its intricate pattern created thanks to the Turkish knot. Or it might be the kind of carpet used as a magic carpet in a fairy story.

If you live near or have visited Harrogate, in Yorkshire, you’ll know about the magnificent nineteenth-century Turkish baths there, with their Islamic arches and glazed brickwork. Perhaps you’re the doting owner of a Turkish Van cat, or love wearing clothes made from angora – ‘Angora’ being the old name for Turkey’s capital, Ankara.

Some readers may remember the ads for Turkish delight – a sweet on which, incidentally, I was hooked at the school tuck shop.

And it’s impossible to talk about compound words formed with Turkish and not mention the Turkish Empire, another name for the Ottoman Empire, that mighty domain which at its height extended over much of South-East Europe, the Middle East and North Africa as this map shows.

Hummus and mezes

Turkey’s historic legacy is explicitly evident in the words mentioned above. In contrast, it’s hidden and implicit in the couple of hundred words English has borrowed from Turkish, words that are either completely Turkish in origin, such as the yoghurt you or I might enjoy for breakfast, or words transmitted via Turkish from Persian or Arabic, such as coffee. Coffee comes, via Italian caffè from Turkish kahve, from Arabic qahwah. When the journeys such words make are so tortuous, one might almost imagine they needed magic carpets to fly into English.

It’s surely in the domain of food and drink that most of us use, even enjoy, Turkish-derived words. Crucial parts of what is generically described as ‘Middle-Eastern cuisine’ are denoted by Turkish words. Yoghurt apart, there’s hummus, mezes, pilafs and bulgur wheat. And who doesn’t enjoy the occasional doner kebab or shish kebab? While kebab’s an Arabic and Urdu word, doner – in Turkish döner – means ‘rotating’ and shish – Turkish şiş – means ‘skewer’. And on a sweeter note, baklavas take some beating as a sweet treat, while sherbet as it originally was might surprise you (see meaning 4). Note also how in British English it means a sort of effervescent sweet powder, in the US a sorbet, and in Australia it’s a jovial term for ‘beer’.

Moving now from food to another area close to everyone’s heart, the home, people who have Turkish rugs may well call them kilims, a term Turkish borrowed from Persian. Possibly these days you’re more likely to find an ottoman, used as a storage box at the foot of the bed, or even a divan bed, which in British English generally means a bed frame with no headboard or footboard. In its original uses divan has a range of meanings, including a Muslim council of state, a collection of poems, and an account book.

Not exactly furniture, more in the realm of accoutrements, come narghiles and chibouks. You might know the first as a hookah or hubble-bubble, the apparatus through which people can smoke. Chibouks, transmitted via French chibouque, from Turkish çubuk, ‘pipe’, to English, are pipes with extremely long stems.

Kaftans and khans

If you can remember the sixties and seventies, you’ll remember that kaftans were a big ‘thing’. Though cottagecore seems to have tapped into the aesthetics of that era, I don’t think kaftans have had a revival as an everyday fashion item, but if you want to shell out a few thousand pounds you can buy a Gucci one. In fact, the term is often loosely (geddit?) applied to any loose-fitting cover-all garment – a far cry from the luxurious robes worn by the Ottoman sultans.

And talking of sultans, a word not from Turkish but from Arabic, enables me finally to segue a tad jerkily into another couple of words to do with rulers and ruling, aga and khan. Aga means literally ‘lord’ in Turkish, and khan, meaning ‘ruler’, had a tortuous route into fourteenth-century English from Old French caan, from Medieval Latin caanus, from Turkish khān, a contraction of khāqān, ‘ruler’. The Aga Khan must therefore be doubly lordly.

Finally, finally, there’s a Turkish outlier in the animal kingdom, the jackal, from Turkish chakāl, from Persian shagāl, from Sanskrit srgāla.

A minor loanword supplier

Everything’s relative, as the cliché goes. Despite the words described, and many more related to religion or Ottoman administration, as a source of loanwords Turkish doesn’t make the top twenty. It sits around position 30, sandwiched below Scottish Gaelic and above Welsh. It is not, as you’ll probably be aware, an Indo-European language. It’s one of the Turkic subfamily of languages, a subfamily which also includes languages such as Azerbaijani, Kazakh, the Uyghur spoken by the Uyghur minority in China, Uzbek and Tatar.

It’s what is known in the trade as an SOV language, where the order is subject-object-verb, which would mean a sentence like ‘John the apple ate’ would be the norm. English is SVO, such that ‘John ate the apple’ is the norm.

There’s no grammatical gender – unlike, say, the Romance and most Germanic and Slavonic languages. In other words, no masculine, feminine, neuter or common gender nouns.

Vowel harmony is a feature and the language is highly agglutinative. That means grammatical elements or morphemes can be combined to produce strings of meaning. English takes three words to say ‘in our houses’. Turkish expresses the same meaning in one string by suffixes added to the base word ‘house’. Thus evlerimizde means ‘in our houses’ and is built up as follows: ev means house’, -ler indicates plurality, -imiz means ‘our’, and -de means ‘in’. Therefore, evlerimizde means ‘in our houses’. The dolma, singular of dolmades mentioned earlier, means literally ‘something filled’ and is composed of two elements: dol– meaning ‘to fill’ plus the -ma suffix used for nouns derived from verbs.

And what about the words Turkish and Ottoman? Turkish is a combination of the English suffix -ish with the Middle English Turk, borrowed from Turkish Türk. The founder of the Ottoman Empire was Osman 1. His name in Turkish was Othman which was arabised as Othmāni and then europeanised as Ottoman.

‘To beard the lion’ and ‘in the lion’s den’ – or the lions’ den?

I’ve been thinking a lot of late – nay, obsessing even – about the hundreds of animal metaphors that colour up English and how they reflect conceptual metaphor theory as first outlined by Lakoff and Johnson in their seminal 1980 Metaphors We Live By.

Recently, I’ve been looking at cat-related ones, including the ‘big cats’, who provide two clear examples, to my mind, of the conceptual metaphor TO ACT COURAGEOUSLY IS TO CONFRONT A DANGEROUS ANIMAL – exemplified in another family of the animal kingdom by to take the bull by the horns.

The two are biblical in origin: to beard the lion in his den and (Daniel) in the lion’s den. They’re still quite often used, as a look at corpus data shows, and I wonder how many people who use them are aware of their ‘back story’.

To beard the lion in his den

Here’s a quotation from New Zealand in 2019 that extends the metaphor even as it encourages young eco-warriors:

You have your fight in front of you, and if you are to succeed, you need to beard the lion pack of climate change deniers in their dens.

People more religious than me will be familiar with the biblical tale, so you’ll humour me if I repeat it.

I’ve had great pleasure today reading it in the treasured Bible (Authorised Version/King James Bible) my mum and dad gave me at my confirmation fifty-six years ago. It was no less a person than the local bishop who confirmed me and my fellow confirmands – now, there’s a word I’ve never had cause to use till now. Not only that: he christened me, too. My loving parents had somehow overlooked that rite earlier, don’t ask me why. And as they’re no longer here, I can’t ask them.

I’m digressing bigly.

Even if you don’t know about bearding the lion, you probably know how the youthful David,  immortalised in sculpture by the Renaissance masters Donatello and Verrocchio before Michelangelo got in on the act, slew the giant Goliath. But as he was only a mere stripling, he had to prove to King Saul that he was up for the top job (1 Samuel 17:35). This he did by telling Saul that, while guarding his father’s flock, a lion and a bear had come and stolen a sheep:

And I went out after him, and smote[1] him, and delivered it out of his mouth: and when he arose against me, I caught him by his beard, and smote him, and slew him.

Note that phrase ‘caught him by his beard.’ The Vulgate Latin version has mentum, meaning ‘the chin’ or ‘the chin with the hair that grows on it’. Coverdale’s 1535 version of the Bible translates this as ‘beerde’, which the Authorised Version has taken over in the extract above.

Now, you might think that to beard the lion is a case of ‘verbing’ specially undertaken to create that biblical saying. Not a bit of it. The verb to beard, which historically has no fewer than nine meanings, already existed and dates back to before 1425. One of its meanings, first recorded in 1476, is ‘to oppose someone boldly or insolently’. So it was an easy matter in 1649 for John Barford in his verse Paraphrastical Meditations upon Isaiah 55 and Psalm 51 to use the phrase in its literal sense:

A stripling small that seemed but a boie,
Did beard the Lion, and a Bear destroie.

But the first citation in the OED of the phrase in its current form, that is, mentioning the ‘den’, and as a metaphor, has to wait till Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion of 1808:

And dar’st thou then
To beard the lion in his den,
The Douglas in his hall?

Marmion vi. xiv. 338

Daniel in the Lions’ Den, Sir Peter Paul Rubens, c.1614-16. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund.

(Daniel) in the lion’s den

Being in the lion’s den refers to confronting a situation that is uncomfortable, demanding or distressing. What follows is an example from sporting journalism, a genre which never eschews a colourful or dynamic metaphor, from the Bournemouth Echo (UK) in 2022.

Rather than baulk at the prospect of entering the proverbial lion’s den on Saturday, Parker claims his side relish fixtures with big things riding on the result.

The metaphor derives from the story of Daniel, a mythical Jewish seer highly favoured by Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Babylon, and by a successor, Darius, King of the Medes and Persians, as told in the Bible Book of Daniel, 6.

Daniel is placed in a position of power by Darius ‘because an excellent spirit was in him’ and is set over the king’s ‘an hundred and twenty princes’, the functionaries we would know better as ‘satraps’, the provincial governors of the Persian Empire. But his enemies conspire against Daniel and persuade the king to pass a decree that ‘whosoever shall ask a petition’ (i.e. pray) to any god or person other than the king will be cast into the den of lions.

Because of his Jewish faith, Daniel must ignore the decree and, inevitably, is found praying, with his windows open in the direction of the Jerusalem from which the Jewish diaspora living in Babylon feels exiled. With a heavy heart, the king commands him to be cast into the lions’ den, for ‘the law of the Medes and Persians altereth not’, and seals it shut with his own signet ring.

That night the king fasts, has no musicians perform for him, and ‘his sleep went from him.’ In the morning he rushes to the cave and asks Daniel if his god has delivered him from the lions. Daniel explains that an angel ‘hath shut the lions’ mouths’, and when he comes out of the den, ‘no manner of hurt was found upon him.’ With the gruesomeness typical of the Old Testament, Daniel’s enemies, their wives and children are literally thrown to the lions, and Darius issues an edict that Daniel’s god is to be feared and reverenced – a major piece of ahistorical retrospective wishful thinking.

As David Crystal has pointed out, while the Authorised Version talks of ‘the den of lions’, the modern metaphor is ‘the lion’s den.’ Why? Because since the seventeenth century it has been the norm for nouns denoting animate beings to have a ‘premodifying genitive’, that is, lion’s den, in this case, not den of lions.

As for whether it’s a singular lion’s den or a plural lions’ den, people seem to use each in roughly equal proportion, though obviously lions’ makes more sense, given that a den surely has to contain more than one lion.

[1] ‘Smote’, in case you’re flummoxed by it, is the past tense of the now archaic verb to smite, ‘to strike very hard’, something which the Old Testament God and his believers seemed to relish doing to His/their enemies. It occurs 221 times, smite 133 and smitten 62.

 

Wimbledon words

With Wimbledon well into its second week (note to self: check who’s playing today!) I want to post here the piece I wrote for Collins Dictionaries. However, I can directly repost it, so I have to enter it as a link here.

Whichever matches you watch, I hope they provide the quality of tennis you love to watch!

‘Bish, bash, bosh’, as someone famously said.

It’s raining cats and dogs – allegedly.

Do people say ‘It’s raining cats and dogs’?

It’s raining cats and dogs is a phrase I could swear by whatever it’s appropriate to swear by that I have never ever uttered in my puff.

To me it sounds distinctly old-fashioned. Moreover, it had struck me as a bit like antidisestablishmentarianism: a linguistic artefact more spoken of than spoken. An idiom that forms part of the canon of idioms to be drummed into the noggins of learners of English (Hey! Aren’t we English speakers wacky!).

To test my suspicions I ran a poll on Twitter. The said poll attracted far, far more respondents than most of my polls. Moreover, it proved my hunch entirely wrong – seemingly.

The poll asked whether people had ever said ‘It’s training cats and dogs‘, or never used it. It furthermore divided respondents into over- and under-fifties.

Well, you could ‘of’ knocked me down with the proverbial feather as the replies piled up.

A majority reported they had uttered it. Overall, 61.6 per cent of respondents were over fifty, 38.4 per cent under fifty. Thus, 165 respondents were over-fifties and 103 were under-fifties.

In both age groups the majority said they had used ‘It’s raining cats and dogs’, but there was a striking difference.

Of the over-fifties, 127 had used the idiom against 38 who hadn’t (77 per cent vs. 23 per cent).

Of the under-fifties, 57 had used the idiom against 46 who hadn’t (55 per cent vs. 45 per cent).

In tabular form:

Age groupHave used the idiomHaven’t used the idiomOver-50s127 (77%)38 (23%)Under-50s57 (55%)46 (45%)

What I didn’t check for was speaker dialect, e.g. is it more used in U.S. English than British?

Google Ngrams shows a rise in usage from about 1980, but the occurrences seem to be largely ‘meta’; when you start to sift through the books in which ‘It’s raining cats and dogs‘ features, they’re collections of idioms or discuss idioms.

A check in one corpus, consisting of a piddling (J for joke) 795 million words, produces just 21 examples. In other words, the idiom occurs 0.02 times per million words (compared, say, with ‘preposterous’, a not common word, at 2,526 examples and 2.56 occurrences per million words). All were from newspapers and 17 of 21 were British English.

The News on the Web Corpus (17.5 billion words) suggested a similar figure of 0.02 times per million words for the UK, Ireland, India, Bangladesh and South Africa, and an even lower figure of 0.01 per million for the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The Corpus of Web-Based Global English (GloWbE) gave an overall higher figure 0.08 per million, ranging from Canada, the lowest, at 0.02 to the Philippines at 0.30.

Other phrases people use

It’s pissing (it) down.

It’s pissin doon. (in Scots)

It’s chucking it down.

It’s plouting. (Geordie)**

It’s pouring.

I would say ‘It’s bucketing down.’

Comments people made

They only use ‘It’s raining cats and dogs‘ ironically or enclosed in air quotes.

They’ve taught it to their ESL or EFL students as an example of an idiom.

One respondent uses it to his children so that he can then make the Dad joke pun ‘Don’t step in a poodle.’

Where does the idiom come from?The myth

This was where that old canard got a mention on Twitter. Cats and dogs used to shelter in the thatch of Tudor houses and when it rained heavily, they were washed out, hence the idiom.

David Wilton’s 2004 book Word Myths (pp. 61–75) repeats in its entirety a lengthy email screed called ‘Life in the 1500s’ which claimed to explain the origins of several phrases as heterogeneous as to throw the baby out with the bathwater, dirt poor, upper crust – and It’s raining cats and dogs.

The Grammarphobia blog replies here to a correspondent asking if the email is fact.

The email tries to make itself believable (my inner editor wrote that to replace the pompous ‘tries to achieve verisimilitude’ [insert face palm emoji]) by piling up details that by themselves sound convincing.

Here’s an example from the British newspaper The Guardian’s Notes and Queries site showing how people swallow unquestioningly such canards:

‘The phrase originated from Tudor times. At that time for most poor people the only place to keep their animals was in the house with the people – and domestic animals would often be put up in the rafters. Roofing at the time was simple thatch that dropped directly into the house so that at times of heavy downpour rain would fall through the thatch, and either flush or encourage the “pets” to return to ground level. Hence the phrase raining cats and dogs.’

In the original email, the reason the animals went up there, together with ‘mice, rats and bugs’ was to keep warm.  

But once you start to ask yourself a common-sense question or two, the whole rickety edifice of folk etymology supposition receives a fierce buffeting from the gales of fact. (I say: steady on with the purple prose. Ed.)

For instance, you’d need an awful lot of cats and dogs per household to make it seem like rain. How did people put them up there, or how did they get up there in the first place? And so forth.

In essence, the thatch explanation is just one of many folk etymologies of the kind skilfully debunked in Michael Quinion’s POSH and other language myths (Ballyhoo, Buckaroo and Spuds in the U.S.)

** Similarly, the respondent who posted ‘plouting’ for Geordie suggested it came from the French il pleut, which sounds like a folk etymology. OED suggests an entirely different origin for the noun ‘plout’; it doesn’t mention a verb.

The explanation

The short answer is that nobody knows the exact origin of the phrase. A whole load of theories exist as catalogued here by the Library of Congress. As an example of a superficially plausible theory that could fool the unwary, the site reports Greek kata doxa, ‘against expectation’ as a source. It’s true that some phrases, e.g. halcyon days, have Greek origins, but the flaw in kata doxa is that doxa does not show the case ending it would have if governed by kata.

I put my money on simple hyperbole. That contention is borne out a) by other English and other-language idioms using various long (hard) objects as the ‘vehicle’ for the metaphor and b) animal images in other languages.

As I pontificated in Damp Squid, ‘There seems to be no reason to entertain these homespun etymologies for a phrase which can be explained by the power of metaphor alone.’

A
It’s raining stair rods.
It’s raining pitchforks.
It’s lashing down.

Caen chuzos de punta (‘Sticks are falling tip downwards’)

Il pleut des cordes (‘It’s raining ropes’).

Es Regnet Bindfäden (‘It’s raining pieces of string’).

B

Il pleut des crapauds (‘It’s raining frogs’).

Il pleut des vaches (‘It’s raining cows’).

Bwrw hen wragedd a ffyn (‘It’s raining old women and sticks’). (Welsh)

Ag caitheamh sceana gréasaí (‘It’s throwing cobbler’s knives). (Irish)

How old is the idiom?

The OED shows ‘It shall raine dogs and polecats’ from a play written before 1652.

The poet Henry Vaughan used a possibly related phrase in a poem published in 1651:

The Pedlars of our age have business yet,
And gladly would against the Fayr-day fit
Themselves with such a Roofe, that can secure
Their Wares from Dogs and Cats rain’d in ••owre,

In 1661 the order we take to be fixed is reversed, ‘if it should rain dogs and cats…’, but by Swift’s 1738 A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation in which the staples and cliches of conversation are parodied, it has become the irreversible binomial it currently is: ‘I know Sir John will go, tho’ he was sure it would rain Cats and Dogs.’

Conclusions

The idiom is not at all common in the corpora consulted.
Its origins are unknown, but rhetorical hyperbole, as suggested by examples in other languages, is a very plausible explanation.
The folk-etymological explanations of its origin can safely be ignored.