27. Slang, Idioms and Raining Cats and Dogs

Star-Spangled Stories. Article 27.

Slang, Idioms and Raining Cats and Dogs

Why in English it "rains cats and dogs", where famous idioms came from, how much truth there is in the stories about their origins, and why they cannot be translated word for word.

A friend from America writes to you: It's raining cats and dogs, so let's take a rain check on the picnic. Don't worry, it's not the end of the world. Maybe next week, it'll be a piece of cake. You understand every word, and yet you may not know what they wanted to tell you.

Welcome to the world of idioms. They are fixed phrases whose meaning cannot be worked out from the individual words. What your friend actually wrote was: "It's raining really hard, so let's put off the picnic. Never mind, it's not a disaster. Maybe next week it will be easy." Idioms are the spice of every language, and because they often have interesting origins, they are also little windows into its history.

Idiom, proverb or slang?

These three terms are often confused, so let's tell them apart first:

Czech has idioms too, of course: "leje jako z konve", "chodit kolem horké kaše" or "hodit flintu do žita". If you translate them literally, an American will not understand. In the same way, a literal translation of an English idiom into Czech usually does not work. An idiom is not translated: it is replaced by another idiom, or explained.

Raining cats and dogs: the story of the most famous idiom

Almost every student of English knows the phrase It's raining cats and dogs. But why would animals fall from the sky? The truth is that nobody knows the exact origin. We only know when the expression appeared.

A similar phrase can be found in the 17th-century comedy The City Wit by the English playwright Richard Brome: It shall rain dogs and polecats. The version with cats and dogs was then made famous by Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver's Travels. In his 1738 book on "polite conversation", one character says he is not afraid to go out, though he was sure it would rain cats and dogs.

There are several theories about the origin. The most sensible one comes from the reality of the time. In the poem A Description of a City Shower (1710), Swift describes a London downpour after which streams full of mud, rubbish, drowned puppies and dead cats flow through the streets. So after heavy rain it really could look as if cats and dogs had rained from the sky. Other researchers link the expression with other exaggerated phrases, like rain pitchforks. It is similar to the Czech "padají trakaře" ("wheelbarrows are falling").

And one more practical note: Americans today know raining cats and dogs, but they use it in everyday speech less than textbooks suggest. More often you will hear a simple It's pouring or It's pouring rain.

Idioms with a real story

For some idioms, on the other hand, we know quite precisely who first used them or how they came about:

Notice the last row. English and Czech have the same image for something incomprehensible, just a different language: to an English speaker Greek sounds incomprehensible, to a Czech it is Spanish ("a Spanish village"). Such parallels are common and help with learning.

A cat in a bag

The idiom let the cat out of the bag means "to give away a secret". It is recorded from 1760 and is explained by a story from the market: a dishonest seller is said to have put a cat in a bag instead of a piglet. Whoever opened the bag "let the cat out of the bag", and the trick was revealed. The story cannot be proved, but it is linked with the older idiom buy a pig in a poke, "to buy a pig in a bag" – exactly our kupovat zajíce v pytli ("to buy a hare in a bag").

American English speaks baseball

Every language takes its idioms from what its speakers know. Czech has many idioms from the countryside and farming (zasít, sklidit, hodit flintu do žita). American English took many idioms from baseball, its national sport. Even people who have never seen a baseball game use them:

Rain check is an especially nice example. Originally it was a ticket a spectator received when a game was stopped because of rain. With it he could come to a replacement game for free. Today Americans use it when they turn down an invitation but want to suggest they would be happy to come another time: Can I take a rain check?

Slang: the language that ages fastest

Slang is informal words and expressions that arise in a particular group: among young people, athletes, musicians or on the internet. It changes very fast. What was trendy ten years ago sounds old-fashioned today, and what is trendy today will be laughable in ten years.

The most famous American slang word is without doubt OK. It was born in Boston at the end of the 1830s, when young journalists joked with abbreviations of deliberately misspelled words. The American linguist Allen Walker Read found that O.K. first appeared in the newspaper Boston Morning Post on 23 March 1839 as an abbreviation of the jokey oll korrect, that is all correct. The word might have died out like the other funny abbreviations, but in 1840 it was helped by the presidential campaign of Martin Van Buren, whose supporters called him Old Kinderhook after his birthplace. His campaign clubs were called OK Clubs. Today OK is probably the most widespread word in the world.

Czech idiom, English idiom

Many Czech idioms have an English counterpart. Sometimes the image is the same, sometimes completely different. For good English it is important to know the English one, not to translate the Czech one:

How to learn idioms

Learn the whole phrase. An idiom is like one long word. You cannot change even a small word in it: it's raining cats and dogs, not dogs and cats.

Notice the style. For each idiom, write down whether it is informal, neutral or old-fashioned. Learner's dictionaries usually tell you.

Look for the story. You will remember an idiom with a story much more easily than a list of phrases. Just bear in mind that not every story is true.

Look for them in texts. Idioms are best learned from series, songs and articles, where you hear them in a natural situation. Our dictionary, which includes idioms from the very first level, will help too.

Conclusion: pictures in language

Idioms and slang show that a language is not just a set of rules, but also a collection of images, jokes and memories. Hidden in English idioms are London playwrights, Shakespeare, Boston journalists and American baseball fans. Whoever understands them understands not only the words, but also the people who speak them. And next time someone writes to you Can I take a rain check?, you will know they are really inviting you to a baseball game.