Hi sagesseargentine,
Thank you for your question. It appears you're definitely not the
first person who made an inquiry into the etymology of the phrase!
Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any specific orgin listed
anywhere. I performed an extensive search and the phrase variations
for different animals "put name of animal here... wedding day" is
worldwide and a mystery as to when and where it originated.
LINGUIST List 9.1795 Thu Dec 17 1998 Sum: Sunshower
http://www.sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de/linguist/issues/9/9-1795.html#1
On November 6, 1998, I posted a request for words or expressions for
the term sunshower (LINGUIST 9.1565), and the number of responses was
overwhelming. I have summarized the responses below, arranged
alphabetically by language. Many thanks to all of you who wrote in
with your ideas; I have tabulated the list of respondents at the end
of this letter.
[scroll from Abkhaz to Zulu]
"1. I came across a small piece in the Guardian Weekly newspaper referring
to the fox's wedding. (The Guardian Weekly is a digest of the Guardian,
and is ditributed overseas. The article was probably in a section of the
paper called "Country Diary"; if pushed, I'd say it was after 1990.) It
seems this term is used in parts of the south west of England. The article
speculated that perhaps the term had originally been 'the folks' wedding',
but I don't think there was any evidence for that. (Dave Cragg)"
=========
Bhikku.net
http://www.bhikku.net/archives/02/mar02.html
Les Noces des Renards
What do you say when it's sunny and raining at the same time, what the
meteorologists call a sunshower? It was always 'a monkey's birthday'
with me - but there's a wide range of variants around the world,
though most of them concentrate on birthdays and weddings. The
commonest expression is 'a fox's wedding', used in Armenia and
Kurdistan (if you can equate a wolf with a fox), Brazil, Bulgaria, the
UK, Finland, India (jackal=fox), Italy, Japan, and Portugal.
=========
What do you say when it's raining and sunny at the same time?
http://www.metafilter.com/comments.mefi/9621
"I wonder which language the "fox/wolf/monkey/rat's wedding" phrase
originated from. It seems to have travelled through almost every
language, and all without me ever hearing of it!
Also, I don't think I read anywhere an explanation for this metaphor.
Does anyone know?"
*****
"Just conjecture here, but I think the foxes' wedding thing is purely
the sense of the magical that accompanies an uncommon occurrence such
as a sunshower. Foxes have mythic godlike qualities in many
cultures...also the wedding is supposed to be secret from the human
world, because the rain would keep us humans indoors...maybe the
aspect of the rainbow that would doubtless be created by a sunshower
lends an element of the mystical as well.
Generally it may be an old legend to deal with a phenomenon man
couldn't quite get his mind around (It's raining and sunny at the same
time. Eek!). Similar to the idea that the Northern Lights would mean
someone's death. In other words, Nature is doing something we don't
understand, better leave it alone."
=========
Wikipedia - Sunshower
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshower
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. (In Swedish its just plain
"solregn" -- sunrain.) A great many languages have animal associations
with this word, often to do with marriage (or, that activity for which
the word marriage may be considered a suitable euphemism).
(see article)
=========
The next 3 site pages are links taken from the Wikipedia article as Sources.
The link for "Detailed list by languages at LINGUIST List 9.1795
(compiled by Bert Vaux Assistant professor of Linguistics Harvard
University)" is posted at the top of my answer.
- World Wide Words
- Languagehat
- Word-detective.com
World Wide Words
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-mon2.htm
"Q] From Gary Williams: ?I wonder if you can shed some light on the
phrase a monkey?s wedding? When I was a child growing up in South
Africa, my mother would use the saying when we had rain and sunshine
at the same time. My wife tells me that she knows the saying from her
family, which is mainly of Irish blood.?
[A] It?s certainly a well-known South African expression. A related
Afrikaans word, jakkalstrou, jackals wedding, also exists. The South
African English version is the direct equivalent (what linguists call
a loan translation) of the Zulu umshado wezinkawu, a wedding for
monkeys."
[see article]
"However, I am baffled as to why and how such phrases should have
arisen. There?s clearly a common association that is understood by
widely divergent language communities, so it seems to be something at
a level below that of superficial culture. But what is it?"
=========
Lanuage Hat
http://www.languagehat.com/archives/000938.php
SUNSHOWER.
What do you call it when rain falls while the sun is shining? An
interesting set of dialect terms; needless to say, I welcome
contributions from other languages (this is not the sort of thing it's
easy to find in a dictionary).
see comments
=========
WordDetective.com
http://www.word-detective.com/072999.html
"Dear Word Detective: In the south there is a common expression that
people say when it is sunny in patches and simultaneously raining:
"The devil is beating his wife." Are you familiar with this expression
and can you perhaps tell me its origin? -- Alice Mullen, via the
internet.
In any case, I had never heard the phrase "The devil is beating his
wife" before, although I have experienced that unusual mix of rain and
sunshine, usually called a "sunshower," on several occasions. And when
I went looking for the precise origin, logic or history of the term,
the cupboards were bare. But while poking around on the internet, I
came across a query about folk terms for "sunshowers" posted by a
Harvard linguist to a linguistics e-mail discussion group last year.
The dozens of responses to his question proved that folks around the
world have come up with some very weird words and phrases for this
meteorological phenomenon.
"The devil is beating his wife," for instance, occurs not only in
English, but Dutch and Hungarian as well. Other such phrases include
"The devil is getting married" (Hungarian), "The devil is kissing his
wife" (Tennessee), and "The devil is having a parish fair" (German).
The other main category of phrases used to explain sunshowers
involves, I kid you not, animal weddings. "The rats are getting
married," one would say in Arabic, while the Bulgarians say it's "the
bear" that's getting hitched. Other betrothed parties include jackals
(Hindi), tigers (Korea), witches (Spain), the poor (Greece), and
leopards (various African languages). One animal, the fox, crops up
all over the world, from Japan to Armenia, in such phrases.
The question raised by all of this is, of course, why? Well, all of
these phrases were probably serious myths at some point, concocted to
explain an unusual weather event. They live on today as colorful folk
sayings, for which we should be grateful."
=========
The Syndey Morning Herald
http://smh.com.au/news/Big-Questions/Why-is-pumpkin-used-as-a-term-of-endearment-but-not-other-vegetables-such-as-potato-and-cauliflower/2004/12/03/1101923318535.html
What is a monkey's wedding day and where does the expression come from?
A monkey's wedding is when it is raining and the sun is shining at the
same time. A sun shower.
=========
keyword search:
foxes wedding day phrase origins
fox's wedding day
linguists monkey's wedding day
sun shower phrase origins
sunshower phrases animals
animal associations sun shower
rain and sun word phrases
=========
Best regards,
tlspiegel - who never heard the expression until today! :) |
