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)
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