As in fibs and fabrications, details in etymologies are often distracting.
In the above entry on the origin of the slang phrase “You’re fired,” the false history referred to the neighbor-removal tactics of “clans of long ago.” The phrase “long ago” is one of those telltale signs of bullshitternetisms, although naming specific places and times doesn’t necessarily lead to veracity.
One bullshitternet classic is “Life in the 1500s,” recounting such “facts” as: “You’ve heard of thatched roofs, well that’s all they were [thatched grammar, well that’s what they had, too]. Thick straw, piled high, with no wood underneath. They were the only place for the little animals to get warm. [By the fire was obviously not an option.] So all the pets; dogs, cats and other small animals, mice, rats, bugs, all lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery so
sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof. Thus the saying, ‘it’s raining cats and dogs.’”
Obviously, animals in the 1500s were much different from those of today. Cats slipped a lot. Dogs were smart enough to figure out that heat rises, which is no surprise because they also figured out how to climb into the roofs of buildings. On the other hand, they seemed to gravitate to the roof during the rainy season, which is warmer than winter—when one would expect that conditions would be considerably more slippery, leading to a more logical “snowing cats and dogs.” Besides, why the cats and the dogs? Why didn’t it rain mice and rats? Why not a bug deluge?
“Life in the 1500s” contains a number of such “explanations,” and I don’t have the space here to appropriately laugh at, mock, and generally jeer them. So I’ll defer to a fascinating book called Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends, by David Wilton. Track it down. He spends seventeen delicious, “Go get ’em David!” pages debunking “Life in the 1500s,” including the domesticated- meteorology myth and other myths surrounding such phrases and words as “throw the baby out with the bathwater,” “wake,” and “dead ringer.”
Final thought: consider the grammar in “Life in the 1500s,” such as the bizarre misuse of semicolons and commas in the above excerpt. It’s the same grammar you find in emails enticing you to send your bank account numbers to “bank officials” overseas in exchange for millions of dollars, euros, pounds, quatloos, or the currency d’jour, or to “click here to activate the computer virus that oddly resembles a naked Angelina Jolie.” (Pssst —those emails aren’t true, either.)
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Bill Brohaugh