Let loose the cats of war

IT was raining cats and dogs in Cape Town last weekend, which made me remember my former Italian teacher and how flummoxed he was when he first heard this expression. “What ’ave cats and dogs to do with rain?” he asked, raising his hands to the dripping sky in that exasperated way Italians have.

I could have responded with an idiom involving pots and kettles. Italians have no leg to stand on in this matter. Our teacher would sometimes say to a student, “Sei fuori!” (“you are outside”) when we were all quite clearly inside the walls and under the roof of a classroom. This confused us until we discovered it was short for “sei fuori di testa” (“you are outside of your head”), in other words, “you are crazy”. Every language has its oddities.

You’d be out of your head to go outside when it was raining cats and dogs, especially if you have allergies. Yet no one seems able to pinpoint the origin of the English phrase. It was made popular by Jonathan Swift in 1738 but popped up here and there for centuries before that.

Why cats and dogs indeed? Why not hedgehogs and marmosets, or pasta? I’d rather have a malamute land on my head than an armadillo, but why rain should be more like beagles than eagles remains a mystery.

When it comes to idioms involving animals, dogs have the territory well marked. Cats aren’t nearly as popular, in the metaphorical sense. Take any dog-related aphorism, replace the word “dog” with the word “cat” and the reason for this will become clear.

“Hangdog” describes the face

SUE DE GROOT of someone who is ashamed of their behaviour. Chastise a dog for coming home late and it will slither along the ground in paroxysms of guilt. Chastise a cat and it will look at you as though you are outside, in the idiomatic Italian sense. Have you ever seen an ashamed cat? That’s why “hangcat” would never work.

Similarly, “work like a dog” could never become “work like a cat”, unless the meaning of the phrase changed to describe the working week of the French farmer. “Dog-tired” couldn’t become “cat-tired” either. Cats, when awake, tend to be alert and refreshed because they’ve had a good nine-hour nap between breakfast and lunch.

Even “let sleeping cats lie” doesn’t work. Waking a sleeping dog is inadvisable because it might leap up and bite you, hence the metaphor for leaving potentially dangerous things just as they are. Wake a sleeping cat and all it will do is go back to sleep again, perhaps after a snack.

Someone told me that dogs are more intelligent than cats because if you point, a dog will look in the direction indicated by your finger. A cat won’t do this. It will keep its eyes fixed on your hand in case there is food in it. I suppose it depends on how you define intelligence.

You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, they say. If you managed to teach a cat of any age any tricks at all, you’d be as happy as a dog with two tails.

Poor old dogs. Their breakfast is always a mess, they have not a chance in hell and people keep being sent to their house for punishment. “A dog’s life” describes an existence of dogged misery, a “dogsbody” is an insignificant drudge, and when a person or country has “gone to the dogs”, it is pretty much beyond redemption. What did dogs do to deserve these low opinions? Aren’t they man’s best friend?

Every dog has his day, but the idea that the underdog might one day become top dog is enough to make a cat laugh. LS