Liliputins -193

Nixon drowned in overflowing Watergate partly because it was raining cats and Checkers ... "
Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein

Democrats and Republicans are fighting like cats and Checkers ... "
Barack Obama

Democrats are playing chess and we are playing Checkers ... "
Richard Nixon


Liliputins. What, the heck, is this ?
http://www.stihi.ru/2012/08/18/5368


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Raining cats and dogs

Meaning
Raining very heavily.

Origin

This is an interesting phrase in that, although there's no definitive origin, there is a likely derivation. Before we get to that, let's get some of the fanciful proposed derivations out of the way.

The phrase isn't related to the well-known antipathy between dogs and cats, which is exemplified in the phrase 'fight like cat and dog'. Nor is the phrase in any sense literal, that is, it doesn't record an incident where cats and dogs fell from the sky. Small creatures, of the size of frogs or fish, do occasionally get carried skywards in freak weather. Impromptu involuntary flight must also happen to dogs or cats from time to time, but there's no record of groups of them being scooped up in that way and causing this phrase to be coined. Not that we need to study English meteorological records for that - it's plainly implausible.

One supposed origin is that the phrase derives from mythology. Dogs and wolves were attendants to Odin, the god of storms, and sailors associated them with rain. Witches, who often took the form of their familiars - cats, are supposed to have ridden the wind. Well, some evidence would be nice. There doesn't appear to be any to support this notion.

It has also been suggested that cats and dogs were washed from roofs during heavy weather. This is a widely repeated tale. It got a new lease of life with the e-mail message "Life in the 1500s", which began circulating on the Internet in 1999. Here's the relevant part of that:

I'll describe their houses a little. You've heard of thatch roofs, well that's all they were. Thick straw, piled high, with no wood underneath. They were the only place for the little animals to get warm. 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."

This is nonsense of course. It hardly needs debunking but, lest there be any doubt, let's do that anyway. In order to believe this tale we would have to accept that dogs lived in thatched roofs, which, of course, they didn't. Even accepting that bizarre idea, for dogs to have slipped off when it rained they would have needed to be sitting on the outside of the thatch - hardly the place an animal would head for as shelter in bad weather.

Another suggestion is that 'raining cats and dogs' comes from a version of the French word 'catadoupe', meaning waterfall. Again, no evidence. If the phrase were just 'raining cats', or even if there also existed a French word 'dogadoupe', we might be going somewhere with this one. As there isn't, let's pass this by.

There's a similar phrase originating from the North of England - 'raining stair-rods'. No one has gone to the effort of speculating that this is from mythic reports of stairs being carried into the air in storms and falling on gullible peasants. It's just a rather expressive phrase giving a graphic impression of heavy rain - as is 'raining cats and dogs'.

The much more probable source of 'raining cats and dogs' is the prosaic fact that, in the filthy streets of 17th/18th century England, heavy rain would occasionally carry along dead animals and other debris. The animals didn't fall from the sky, but the sight of dead cats and dogs floating by in storms could well have caused the coining of this colourful phrase. Jonathan Swift described such an event in his satirical poem 'A Description of a City Shower', first published in the 1710 collection of the Tatler magazine. The poem was a denunciation of contemporary London society and its meaning has been much debated. While the poem is metaphorical and doesn't describe a specific flood, it seems that, in describing water-borne animal corpses, Swift was referring to an occurrence that his readers would have been well familiar with:

Now in contiguous Drops the Flood comes down,
Threat'ning with Deluge this devoted Town.
...
Now from all Parts the swelling Kennels flow,
And bear their Trophies with them as they go:
Filth of all Hues and Odours seem to tell
What Street they sail'd from, by their Sight and Smell.
They, as each Torrent drives, with rapid Force,
From Smithfield or St. Pulchre's shape their Course,
And in huge Confluent join'd at Snow-Hill Ridge,
Fall from the Conduit, prone to Holbourn-Bridge.
Sweeping from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood,
Drown'd Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench'd in Mud,
Dead Cats and Turnip-Tops come tumbling down the Flood.

We do know that the phrase was in use in a modified form in 1653, when Richard Brome's comedy The City Wit or The Woman Wears the Breeches referred to stormy weather with the line:

"It shall raine... Dogs and Polecats".

Polecats aren't cats as such but the jump between them in linguistic rather than veterinary terms isn't large and it seems clear that Broome's version was essentially the same phrase. The first appearance of the currently used version is in Jonathan Swift’s A Complete Collection of Polite and Ingenious Conversation in 1738:

"I know Sir John will go, though he was sure it would rain cats and dogs".

The fact that Swift had alluded to the streets flowing with dead cats and dogs some years earlier and now used 'rain cats and dogs' explicitly is good evidence that poor sanitation was the source of the phrase as we now use it.

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fight like cat and dog  (British & Australian) also fight like cats and dogs (British & American)
to argue violently all the time

We get on very well as adults but as kids we fought like cat and dog.
See also: and, cat, dog, fight, like

Cambridge Idioms Dictionary, 2nd ed. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2006. Reproduced with permission.

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chess = шахматы
checkers = шашки

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Checkers speech

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Checkers speech or Fund speech was an address made on September 23, 1952 by the Republican vice presidential candidate, California Senator Richard Nixon. Nixon had been accused of improprieties relating to a fund established by his backers to reimburse him for his political expenses. With his place on the Republican ticket in doubt, he flew to Los Angeles and delivered a half-hour television address in which he defended himself, attacked his opponents, and urged the audience to contact the Republican National Committee (RNC) to tell it whether he should remain on the ticket. During the speech, he stated that regardless of what anyone said, he intended to keep one gift: a black-and-white dog who had been named Checkers by the Nixon children, thus giving the address its popular name.

Nixon, as he related in his address, came from a family of moderate means, and had spent much of his time after law school either in the military, campaigning for office, or serving in Congress. After his successful 1950 Senate campaign, Nixon's backers continued to raise money to finance his political activities. These contributions went to reimburse him for travel costs, postage for political mailings which he did not have franked, and similar expenses. Such a fund was not illegal at the time, but as Nixon had made a point of attacking government corruption, it exposed him to charges he might be giving special favors to the contributors.

The press became aware of the fund in September 1952, two months after Nixon's selection as General Dwight D. Eisenhower's running mate. Within a few days, the story grew until the controversy threatened Nixon's place on the ticket. In an attempt to turn the tide of public opinion, Nixon broke off a whistle-stop tour of the West Coast to fly to Los Angeles to make a television and radio broadcast to the nation; the $75,000 to rent the television time was raised by the RNC. The idea for the Checkers reference came from Franklin Roosevelt's Fala speech—given eight years to the day before Nixon's address—in which Roosevelt mocked Republican claims that he had sent a destroyer to fetch his dog, Fala, when the dog was supposedly left behind in the Aleutian Islands.

Nixon's speech was seen or heard by about 60 million Americans, including the largest television audience to that time, and led to an outpouring of public support. A huge majority of the millions of telegrams and phone calls received by the RNC and other political offices supported Nixon. He was retained on the ticket, which then swept to victory weeks later in November 1952. The Checkers speech was an early example of a politician using television to appeal directly to the electorate, but has since sometimes been mocked or denigrated. Checkers speech has come more generally to mean any emotional speech by a politician.

Legacy
 

With The New York Times finding that Nixon's performance had given the Republican ticket "a shot in the arm",[79] Eisenhower and Nixon swept to victory in November, with the Republicans narrowly taking both Houses of Congress.[79] According to Nixon biographer Conrad Black, the speech earned Nixon supporters throughout Middle America which he would keep through the rest of his life, and who would continue to defend him after his death.[80] Critics, however, would later see the address as the "ultimate expression" of the controversial politician's "phoniness."[81] Nixon biographer Stephen Ambrose stated that part of the audience considered the address "one of the most sickening, disgusting, maudlin performances ever experienced."[77]

The address was an unprecedented demonstration of the power of television to galvanize large segments of the American people to act in a political campaign.[82] However, the onslaught of negative media attention leading up to the address "left its scars" on Nixon,[83] and the future president never returned to the easy relationship with the press that he had enjoyed during his congressional career.[80] His oft-stated view that the media was the enemy came to play a part in his downfall.[84]
 
The Nixons' black-and-white cocker spaniel Checkers (1952–1964)

Nixon celebrated the anniversary of the speech each year.[80] The future president disliked the fact that the address soon became popularly known as the "Checkers speech." In his 1962 book, Six Crises (the Fund crisis being one of the six), he would object to the term, "as though the mention of my dog was the only thing that saved my political career."[85] Nixon preferred to call the address "the Fund speech,"[22] and made it required reading for his speechwriters.[84] As time passed, the Checkers speech became denigrated, and Nixon biographer Earl Mazo suggested that much of the attitude of "I don't like Nixon, but I don't know why," which contributed to the failure of his 1960 presidential run, can be traced to the Checkers speech.[86] Other commentators suggested that had he not made the Checkers speech, Nixon might have won in 1960. Nixon retorted that without the Checkers speech, he would not have been around to run in 1960.[86]
Checkers died in 1964 and was buried in Wantagh, New York, at Long Island's Bide-A-Wee Pet Cemetery.[87] William Safire has described the adoption of "Checkers speech" as an idiom, used to refer to any emotionally charged speech by a politician.[84]
Despite the many criticisms of the speech in later years, Hal Bochin (who wrote a book about Nixon's rhetoric) suggests that Nixon succeeded at the time because of his use of narrative, spinning a story which resonated with the public:

[The American people] could identify with the materials of the story—the low-cost apartment, the struggle with the mortgage payment, the parental loans, the lack of life insurance on the wife and children, and even the wife's cloth coat. By reputation, Nixon was a political fighter and also a family man, and the public admired the father who would not give back the family dog "regardless of what they said about it."[88]