…it’s raining cats and dogs?
As is well-known, it never rains cats and dogs. Therefore, people keep wondering where the odd phrase came from. It surfaced in print in the middle of the 17th century, and the hypotheses of its origin are numerous. Some of them pretend to explain only the reference to cats and have no value by definition. Others are pure fancy. Such as the idea that torrential rains used to carry along with them the refuse of the streets, including many dead animals. Somebody who has never read Scandinavian myths suggested that in northern mythology cats are said to be influenced by the coming storm and that the weather god Odin’s animals were hounds. But Old Norse cats had nothing to do with rain, while Odin was not a weather god and never owned dogs.
Yet a sensible explanation of the idiom seems to exist. The phrase “it rained cats and dogs and pitchforks”has been recorded. Also, in 1592 a reliable author wrote: “Instead of thunderbolts shooteth nothing but dogboltes and catboltes.” The words ‘dogbolts’ and ‘catbolts’, denoting ‘iron bars’, are still current in dialects. The original idea was that a downpour of sharp objects fell to the ground.
Perhaps this is how our current idiom originated, with speakers shortening catbolts and dogbolts to cats and dogs. Perhaps is a necessary caveat. In etymology, regardless of whether we deal with a word or a phrase, few solutions are final.
Anatoly Liberman, professor and author of An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology (University of Minnesota Press, 2008)
When were the last hieroglyphs written?
The last known hieroglyphs were carved on “the birthday of Osiris, his dedication feast, year 110” – 24 August AD 394 – at the temple complex at Philae in southern Egypt.
This had been an important religious centre for well over 600 years, particularly for the cult of Osiris. This inscription, however, was carved by a priest named Nesmeterakhem (or Esmet-Akhom) next to a depiction of the god Mandulis as a human-headed falcon. There is also an accompanying text in Demotic script, a simpler form of cursive writing which evolved from hieroglyphs.
By 394 hieroglyphics were near extinction, the preserve of a diminishing priestly class. It’s probably significant that Philae was outside the Roman emp
