Delightful, isn't it, Mark, this agnosis? That +nobody+ can prove, can own
what the phrase originates from. Language is thereby free again.
With the poem it was just a starting point - I just, in an idle moment,
thought, visualised, the actuality, the slaughterhouse carnage. Afterwards I
did wonder, as many do, of where it comes from: my guess is that it is
purely metaphorical, indicating both extreme violence, as in a cat-and-dog
fight, and unlikeliness, pace Christopher, but the beauty is that it can be
no more than my, or anybody else's, guess.
Such open doors in language are where poets can sneak through, to the
frustration of the key-holders.
Another interesting point about it is that a) it is a cliche - 'everybody'
knows what it means and b) 'nobody' knows what it means. So thereby the
commonplace, the dead inert routine language of predictabilty, of
unimaginative dullness, that bureacratic and corporate delight, is suddenly
thrown open, revealing within the licentious liberty of language within, as
riotously unknowable as Finnegans Wake (!)
Best
Dave
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Weiss" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, November 01, 2005 10:44 PM
Subject: Re: Cats and Dogs (was Re: Fugue)
> Then there's the catapult theory, said cats and dogs projected as payload.
> "You don't want to go outside--it's raining cats and dogs" meaning: safer
> to stay at home and hide under the bed.
>
> At 01:36 PM 11/1/2005, you wrote:
> ><snip>
> >On cats and dogs as meteorological events, one can happily say that
nobody
> >knows the true origin of the phrase. [DB]
> ><snip>
> >
> >A cognitive explanation may be the most probable and the simplest: cats
and
> >dogs as exemplars of the unlikely ('cata doxas', against experience, as
yet
> >another folk etymology has it). Hence also the remarkable 'ou vrouens met
> >knopkieries reen' (it's raining old ladies with knobkerries) in
Afrikaans.
> >
> >CW
> >__________________________________________________________
> >
> >'War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.' (Ambrose Bierce)
|