Soon it would be time for school exams. The first subject in the schedule was usually English. The friends had spent a lot of time in the term gone by learning idioms. They realised that while meaning of some of the idioms was fairly obvious, others which were rooted in some long forgotten tradition, folklore, bible or history, tended to confuse them.
"Idioms pidiums -why do we need them? How do they affect our life?" asked Jones as Muthu and his mates studied together... Jones liked things to be straightforward and not *obtuse!
"If you want to sound clever it will be good to use idioms in your conversations. But I suppose that is not really your interest?" asked the scholarly Bala aka Maamu. Jones did not fully understand what Bala was trying to say to him but he knew that his friend was making a dig at him.
Jones was ready to thrash up Bala but Muthu intervened and said, "I think the better way to say it would be that idioms make our conversations interesting. It is like adding spices and flavours to our food. Without spices, much of our food would be uninteresting. You know, one set of idioms which are really interesting and fun to learn are those associated with animals. Try to imagine... If someone actually put a cart before a horse, would it not be silly and create difficulty?"
Jones agreed there was some sense in that idiom but wondered why the tail should wag the dog? Or for that matter would it ever rain cats and dogs? Life would go on even if we simply said it rained heavily.
"Thereby hangs a tale," Bala declared grandly, "In olden days, in England the thatched slanting roof was the only place for animals to get some warmth. So all the dogs, cats and other small animals (mice rats, and bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained heavily, the roof turned slippery and the animals would slip and fall off the roof. That gave rise to the saying."
Muthu's elder sister who walked in felt the more probable source of 'raining cats and dogs' was the sad fact that, in the filthy streets of old England, heavy rain would carry along dead animals along with other garbage. This could well have caused the idiom.
