If it's raining cats and dogs where you are, consider yourself lucky.
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The East Coast skipped over raining cats and dogs and went straight to hailing iguanas during this week's severe weather.
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It's only when I back the car out of the driveway that I notice that it's raining cats and dogs.
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New York (CNN Business)It was raining cats and dogs on Wall Street on Friday: Online pet supplies retailer Chewy made its debut.
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Yes. Would I have loved to have a cozy, frothy, comforting cappuccino from my local coffee shop when it was raining cats and dogs on Sunday?
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For example, "it is raining cats and dogs" is an idiom that means it's raining heavily; it doesn't mean that cats and dogs are falling from the sky.
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However, wildcat was American slang for any risky business venture by 1838, long before the rise of the petroleum industry.Christine Ammer.It's Raining Cats and Dogs ... and Other Beastly Expressions (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1989) 152. An example was the wildcat banking of the 1850s.
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"Imagine that it's raining cats and dogs and you're locked in a north woods cabin for weeks with the people you like least, and you'll pretty much have a feel for what it's like to sit through this movie," said Hal Hinson of The Washington Post.
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Papagno, C., Oliveri, M., Romero, L. (2002). Neural correlates of idiom comprehension. Cortex, 38, 895-898. Recent research with healthy adults using fMRI also found that, when processing idioms that were not literally interpretable (i.e., raining cats and dogs), the Broca’s area in the left prefronto-temporal network was activated.
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Another branch of lexicology is phraseology. Phraseology studies compound meanings of two or more words, such as "raining cats and dogs". The meaning of the phrase as a whole has a different meaning than each individual word. phraseology examines how and why such meanings come in everyday use, and the laws that govern these word combinations.
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He tries to 'chisel in, but the guy got in [his] hair' and John is made to leave. Outside it is 'raining cats and dogs'. He 'feels blue', and 'everything looks black', but he 'carries on'. After moving to 'the thousand islands' and becoming a 'beach comber', he still misses Mary, and a tear 'runs down his cheek'.
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In associative priming, the target is a word that has a high probability of appearing with the prime, and is "associated" with it but not necessarily related in semantic features. dog is an associative prime for cat, since the words are closely associated and frequently appear together (in phrases like "raining cats and dogs"). A similar effect is known as context priming. Context priming works by using a context to speed up processing for stimuli that are likely to occur in that context.
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This was named after Lewis Angell, the first borough engineer of West Ham, who was responsible for the construction of the pond during the winter of 1893–94. The spelling soon became corrupted, as early postcards show. This is a circular muddy hollow which can dry out completely in hot weather. The only other semi-permanent pond is that by Lake House Road known as the Cat and Dog Pond, presumably because it only exists when it has been raining 'cats and dogs'.
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And then the dogs begin to fall ... From the Somme to Stalingrad, Vietnam to Kuwait, Dogfall unflinchingly depicts the absurdity of war; a world turned upside down, where outside it is literally raining cats and dogs, men behave like beasts, and death is all around. Stylistically, the play shifts gradually from naturalistic convention into absurdism. There is a unity of character and psychology throughout, but there is no unity of time and location to the outside world. Instead, with each scene the play jumps forward to a new war, a fresh conflict and different enemies.
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In lexicography, a lexical item (or lexical unit / LU, lexical entry) is a single word, a part of a word, or a chain of words (catena) that forms the basic elements of a language's lexicon (≈ vocabulary). Examples are cat, traffic light, take care of, by the way, and it's raining cats and dogs. Lexical items can be generally understood to convey a single meaning, much as a lexeme, but are not limited to single words. Lexical items are like semes in that they are "natural units" translating between languages, or in learning a new language.
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The idea for the play came to Ionesco while he was trying to learn English with the Assimil method. Impressed by the contents of the dialogues, often very sober and strange, he decided to write an absurd play named L'anglais sans peine ("English without toil"). Other possible titles which were considered included Il pleut des chiens et des chats, ("It's raining cats and dogs", translated in French literally); "L'heure anglaise"The Theatre of the Absurd, by Martin Esslin, revised and enlarged edition; published 1968 by Pelican Books; p. 137 and "Big Ben Follies".
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However, according to others, wildcat meant a rash speculator as early as 1812, and by 1838 had been extended to any risky business venture.Christine Ammer, It's Raining Cats and Dogs ... and Other Beastly Expressions (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1989) 152 A common conception of the wildcat bank in Westerns and like stories was of a bank that left its safe somewhat ajar for depositors to see, in which the banker would display a barrel full of nails, grain or flour with a thin sprinkling of cash on top, thus fooling depositors into thinking it was a successful bank.
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American political cartoon, 1904 The Russian Bear () is a widespread symbol (generally of a Eurasian brown bear) for Russia, used in cartoons, articles and dramatic plays since as early as the 16th century,Christine Ammer, It's Raining Cats and Dogs and Other Beastly Expressions (BookBaby, 2012) and relating alike to the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and the present-day Russian Federation. It often was and is used by Westerners, originated in British caricatures and later also used in the United States, and not always in a flattering context – on occasion it was used to imply that Russia is "big, brutal and clumsy" (see 19th-century cartoon below).
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