Sunshower
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
Sunshower is an expression which refers to "rain while the sun shines" in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and also in parts of Britain. Surprisingly the word appears only in a few dictionaries. This word exists in many languages. A great many of them have animal associations, often to do with marriage (or, that activity for which the word marriage may be considered a suitable euphemism).
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Use in other languages
A monkey’s wedding is a expression used in South Africa. Afrikaans word for it is jakkalstrou, jackals wedding. The South African English version is the loan translation of the Zulu umshado wezinkawu, a wedding for monkeys.
In Arabic, it seems the term is “the rats are getting married”, while Bulgarians prefer to speak of bears doing so. In Hindi it becomes “the jackal’s wedding”. One animal, the fox crops up all over the world, from Japan to Armenia, there’s even an English dialect term, “the foxes’ wedding”, known from the south west of England. In Calabria, it is said that “when it rains with sun, the foxes are getting married”. Other betrothed parties include tigers (Korea), witches (Spain), the poor (Greece), and leopards (various African languages). In Polish, the saying is that “when the sun is shining and the rain is raining, the witch is making butter”.
Devils
There’s a well-known version in the American South, at least among older people: “The devil’s behind his kitchen door beating his wife with a frying pan”, usually shortened just to “The Devil's beatin' his wife”. "The devil is beating his wife," for instance, occurs not only in English, but in Dutch and Hungarian as well. Other such phrases include "The devil is getting married" (Hungarian), "The devil is kissing his wife" (Tennessee, USA), and "The devil is having a parish fair" (German). Several other languages refer to devils as in Turkish: “the devils are getting married”.
In Swedish its just plain "solregn" - sunrain.
Sources
- Detailed list by languages at LINGUIST List 9.1795 (http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/linguist/issues/9/9-1795.html#1)(compiled by Bert Vaux Assistant professor of Linguistics Harvard University)
- World Wide Words (http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-mon2.htm)
- Languagehat (http://www.languagehat.com/archives/000938.php)
- Word-detective.com (http://www.word-detective.com/072999.html)
Links
- The Wyandot Nation of Kansas (http://www.wyandot.org/sunshower.htm)
References
- Blust, Robert (1998) The Fox's Wedding. Manuscript, University of Hawaii.
- Evgen'jeva, A. P., ed. (1985-) Slovar' russkogo jazyka v 4 tomakh, 3rd edition. Moscow.
- Kuusi, Matti (1957) Regen bei Sonnenschein: Zur Weltgeschichte einer Redensart. "Folklore Fellows Communications" n. 171, Helsinki 1957 (it appeared translated into Italian in the journal "Quaderni di Semantica" 13 (1992) and 14 (1993)).
- Hoffmann-Krayer, E. (1930-31) Handwrterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens. Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter.
