A cascade of good fortune
Last time, the challenge was to come up with a counterpart to “When it rains it pours” for use when the figurative shower consists of good things.
Barbara Leventhal, of Raynham, and Barry Fadden, of Dorchester, hewed closely to the wording of the original saying to propose, respectively, “When happiness reigns, it soars!” and “Sunshine reigns when good things pour.” But those strike me as the kind of thing that only a secret agent making contact with a new informant would ever say. (Fun fact: In spy lingo, the code words one says when identifying oneself to a new contact are called paroles.)
There’s usually at least one reader of every column who questions the premise of the current challenge, and this time it was Arthur Magni, of Newton, who doesn’t think “When it rains . . .” “necessarily carries a pejorative connotation.”
Arthur, you’re right that the expression doesn’t necessarily have that connotation, but you wouldn’t know it from dictionaries, including Merriam-Webster online, which gives this definition: “used to say that when something bad happens other bad things usually happen at the same time.”
I’ll grant you, too, that originally the saying’s connotations were entirely positive. In the early 1900s the Morton Salt Company tweaked the humble 18th-century proverb “It never rains but it pours” to play up its product’s primary selling point — and “When it rains it pours” quickly became a marketing and branding triumph.
In Morton’s sly interpretation — which apparently everyone got back then — the two “it”s in the saying have different meanings. The first “it” is linguists’ favorite example of an “impersonal pronoun” — one that has no antecedent, meaning it doesn’t refer back to anything in particular. (In “It’s raining,” what is “it”?) The second “it” is the salt, to which Morton’s had added an anticaking agent so that it stayed free-flowing even in rainy or humid weather instead of hardening into a lump the way salt in shakers near the sea still often do.
But let’s get back to putting a name to many good things.
Noreen Barnes, of Acton; Sue D’Arcangelo, of Scituate; and Marjory Wunsch, of Cambridge, all naughtily proposed clusterluck, though Marjory also found Grated inspiration and submitted happystance as well.
Cyndy Overgaag, of West Springfield, took a positive approach toward the positive saying or coinage we seek, writing: “I always try to have an attitude of gratitude and say ‘Why me?’ when things go right and not just when they go wrong. Having many things going your way at once puts you in a zone of gratitude, or a gratizone: ‘Man, I’m in the gratizone lately! Things are going great!’”
Penny Randolph, of Manchester, submitted three possible coinages: blissfall, blissfill, and blissfuel. And Kathy Ruseckas, of Leyden, wrote: “When we have a windfall of blissful events, it’s a blissfall. Maybe if we have a good word for it, we will encounter it more often. May you have a blissfall this week.”
I like that coinage. I like it a lot. This time, Penny and Kathy earn bragging rights for blissfall. Congratulations to you both! And I hope your receipt of this award is just the beginning of a blissfall for you in the days to come.
Now Andrew Felcher, of Portland, Ore., “would like a word for the opposite of déjà vu — a word that would describe the feeling of learning something a hundred times but never being able to remember it.”
That happens to me all the time with sequences of computer keystrokes that are supposed to be shortcuts but lead me into mysterious, uncharted territory.
Send your suggestions for Andrew’s word to me at Barbara.Wallraff@globe.com by noon on Friday, March 15, and kindly tell me where you live. Responses may be edited.
And please keep in mind that meanings in search of words are always welcome.