Origins Of Phrases (Notes; Queries; Oddities)

Floyd1 said:
It mentions how he was brought up by his older sister (who never smiled apparently).
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Grayson, gay himself, said of gay people 'Gay? I've never seen such a miserable lot in my life!'

I saw him say that on TV. Can't remember the context but it was confusing for Young Teenage Me. :dunno:

Mark Gatiss plays Grayson in the Noele Gordon miniseries Nolly.
 
escargot said:
Grayson, gay himself, said of gay people 'Gay? I've never seen such a miserable lot in my life!'

I saw him say that on TV. Can't remember the context but it was confusing for Young Teenage Me. :dunno:

Mark Gatiss plays Grayson in the Noele Gordon miniseries Nolly.
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I'll have to watch that. Anything with Helena Bonham Carter in.
My introduction to Larry was the Generation Game. I quite fancied Isla St Clair at the time.
 
escargot said:
Reminds me of how the word 'Calcutta' is a pun on the French 'Quel cul t'as!' or 'What a lovely bum you have!'

An 1876 oil painting by the artist Tissot, The Gallery of HMS 'Calcutta' (Portsmouth), also known as Officer and Ladies on Board HMS Calcutta, shows a naval lieutenant flirting with two well-dressed young women. Tissot wasn't averse to hinting at impropriety among the upper classes.
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Which lead to the title of the long running musical Oh! Calcutta!
 
Xanatic* said:
Isn't it possible the bird was named after that, rather than the other way around? Like a sea trickster.
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No. The noun gull, meaning a type of sea bird, is derived from Brythonic Celtic. (Sea)gull in Cornish is golan and in Welsh is gwylan.
Interestingly, another bird name thought to have derived from Cornish is penguin, meaning white head.
The verb to gull someone and hence gullible/gullibility, is unrelated to the sea bird and probably comes from Old French and is related to guile.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
No. The noun gull, meaning a type of sea bird, is derived from Brythonic Celtic. (Sea)gull in Cornish is golan and in Welsh is gwylan.
Interestingly, another bird name thought to have derived from Cornish is penguin, meaning white head.
The verb to gull someone and hence gullible/gullibility, is unrelated to the sea bird and probably comes from Old French and is related to guile.
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Then here's the Wheatear supposedly a misshearing of the Scottish accented local name of White arse.
 
Stormkhan said:
but it implies that people can have actions with reck?
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Careful now...
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Stormkhan said:
The word 'reckless'.
I'm not aware of it's origin, but it implies that people can have actions with reck?
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Middle English recheles, from Old English receleas "careless, thoughtless, heedless," earlier reccileas, literally "not recking (of consequences)" from *rece, recce "care, heed," from reccan "to care" (see reck (v.)) + -less. The same affixed form is in German ruchlos, Dutch roekeloos "wicked."

The root verb reck (Old English reccan) is passing into obscurity; the range of Middle English spellings might reflect uncertainty even then about it, e.g. rechiles, retcheles, recelease, richeles, regeles, reccles, rakeles.
 
Raining Cats & Dogs is an odd one, what has rain got to do with cats or dogs?

There’s no definite origin for it.

The phrase might have its roots in Norse mythology, medieval superstitions, the obsolete word catadupe (waterfall), or dead animals in the streets of Britain being picked up by storm waters.

The first recorded use of a phrase similar to “raining cats and dogs” was in the 1651 collection of poems Olor Iscanus. British poet Henry Vaughan referred to a roof that was secure against “dogs and cats rained in shower.”

In 1738, Jonathan Swift published his “Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation,” a satire on the conversations of the upper classes. One of his characters fears that it will “rain cats and dogs.” Whether Swift coined the phrase or was using a cliché, his satire was likely the beginning of the phrase’s popularity

Swift also wrote a poem, “City Shower” (1710), that described floods that occurred after heavy rains. The floods left dead animals in the streets, and may have led locals to describe the weather as “raining cats and dogs.”
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The oft-told (and hence likely apocryphal) tale is that 'back in the village', the thatched roofs would be warm (owing to internal fireplaces) and relatively low, so cats and dogs would hop up and laze on them.

Once heavy rain came, they'd jump down—falling through the air—which might cause our mythical witness (peering through the doorway from within perhaps) to observe that 'it's raining cats and dogs'.

Not 100% convinced myself.
 
Yithian said:
The oft-told (and hence likely apocryphal) tale is that 'back in the village', the thatched roofs would be warm (owing to internal fireplaces) and relatively low, so cats and dogs would hop up and laze on them.

Once heavy rain came, they'd jump down—falling through the air—which might cause our mythical witness (peering through the doorway from within perhaps) to observe that 'it's raining cats and dogs'.

Not 100% convinced myself.
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Sounds unlikely - cats maybe likely to climb on roofs, dogs not so much.
blessmycottonsocks said:
The etymology of the French equivalent is rather easier to discern (if you've ever witnessed a cow urinating).

Il pleut comme vache qui pisse.
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That’s a bit more to the point
 
To be fair, we do have a lot of ways of describing rain in the UK.
Probably as many ways as the Inuit have of describing snow.
Pouring down, spitting, drizzling, mizzling, blinding down, pissing down, chucking it down, coming down in bucketfuls, raining stair-rods, tipping it down, etc etc
 
According to the Library of Congress page on the expression, we don't really know.

What is the origin of the phrase "it's raining cats and dogs?"

Here's their list of popular theories:

  • Odin, the Norse god of storms, was often pictured with dogs and wolves, which were symbols of wind. Witches, who supposedly rode their brooms during storms, were often pictured with black cats, which became signs of heavy rain for sailors. Therefore, “raining cats and dogs” may refer to a storm with wind (dogs) and heavy rain (cats
  • “Cats and dogs” may come from the Greek expression cata doxa, which means “contrary to experience or belief.” If it is raining cats and dogs, it is raining unusually or unbelievably hard.
  • “Cats and dogs” may be a perversion of the now obsolete word catadupe. In old English, catadupe meant a cataract or waterfall. A version of catadupe existed in many old languages.In Latin, for example, catadupa was borrowed from the classical Greek κατάδουποι, which referred to the cataracts of the Nile River. So, to say it’s raining “cats and dogs” might be to say it’s raining waterfalls.
  • A false theory stated that cats and dogs used to cuddle into thatch roofs during storms and then be washed out during heavy rains. However, a properly maintained thatch roof is naturally water resistant and slanted to allow water to run off. In order to slip off the roof, the animals would have to be lying on the outside—an unlikely place for an animal to seek shelter during a storm.
 
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