Abstract Thursday: "Animal...Raining Cats & Dogs"!

This is a bit of a cheat. Ingeborg asked for abstracts on the theme of "Animal" for today's challenge. Well we don't have any pets and granddog Oona is 3,400 miles away in Toronto. I pondered blipping the worms in the compost bin in the garden but thought that might be a bit revolting (although you never know, they may feature in a future blip!).

Anyway it's been pouring down all day so I wasn't tempted to go out to look for an animal. I stuck the telephoto lens on and took a shot from our bedroom window of the rain splashing into a puddle across the road, as it's "raining cats and dogs". (In case any non-native English speakers are confused, I apologise: that's an idiom for a heavy downpour!). Of course it has been abused a little in Photoshop.

This prompted me to look up theories on the origin of this weird term. It seems there are two main competing theories. One is that the term derives from Victorian times when street drainage was so poor that pets left on the streets would drown during rain storms. After the rainfall, the dead cats and dogs strewn across the streets made it appear as though it had been raining cats and dogs.The alternative, also from Victorian times, is that the term derives from when household pets, like cats and dogs, slept during the night on the eaves of houses. When it rained heavily, the water from the roof washed them off the eaves, and they came down with the torrent of water from the roofs of houses. So there you are, take your pick!

Of course here in Geordieland we would be just as likely to say that it's "stotting doon wi' rain". In Northen English and Scottish, "to stot" means to bounce or rebound. It's well known that Geordie has several Scandinavian influences and I've read that the word probably has Scandinavian or Dutch origins.