There
is a well known English idiom that says; It's raining cats and dogs!
Which simply means that it is raining very heavily. No one really
knows though, from where this strange idiom has originated. The
earliest use of this idiom probably is found in a book written around
1740 by English author Jonathan Swift*, who had also penned a poem: A
Description of a City Shower:
in 1710. This poem goes on something like this:
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.
Drown’d puppies, stinking sprats, all drench’d in mud,
Dead cats, and turnip-tops, come tumbling down the flood.
If
raining cats and dogs means raining heavily, if I dare to say: It's
raining fishes! What could it really mean? Well! In this case, it is
no idiom and if we have to go by the experience of some villagers in
Sri Lanka, it literally means that precisely.
On
Monday, 5th
May 2014, villagers living in the district of Chilaw in Sri Lanka
heard something heavy falling along with the rain. Worried, they
left their homes to find out what was happening. To their utmost
surprise and delight, they found scores of small fish- each three to
five inches (5cm-8cm) in length- falling on the village green, roads
and roofs. The fish rain was plentiful and abundut as total weight of
fish that were collected by villagers exceeded even 50kg (110lbs).
Most of the fish were alive, when they hit the ground. Villagers put
them in buckets of water and later had a real feast, when they ate
them.
Scientifically,
this fish rain can be explained easily. This unusual event was most
likely caused by a tornado, which is a complex meteorological process
that causes a rapidly rotating column of air that spins out from the
base of storm clouds. Such tornadoes can act like giant vacuum
cleaners sucking up any material in their path. When swirling
whirlwinds over relatively shallow water, it develops into
waterspouts and sucks in almost anything in the water including fish,
eels and even frogs. The marine life can be carried over long
distances by buffeting clouds even when the waterspout stops
spinning, keeping them alive all the time. Tornadoes are known to
form when large differences in both temperature, humidity and wind
speed and direction occur.
Some
of the world's most devastating tornadoes happen in US. But the
tornadoes there usually form, well away from any large water bodies
and that is why, no fish ever get sucked up. The stronger tornadoes
in US also tend to form over lands where huge temperature and
humidity differences are seen very often.
In
1912, Sri Lanka had three occurrences of such special rains. A prawn
rain first and then yellow and red meteor rains. Sri Lanka has a
long coast line when compared to its landmass, being an island. Sri
Lankans love there fish and Fish is a valued commodity. No wonder
that Villagers in the Chilaw district of Sri Lanka, were more than
happy to have free meal sent to them by nature.
* Jonathan Swift ( 1667 – 1745) was an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whigs, then for the Tories), poet and cleric who became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin.He is remembered for works such as Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal, A Journal to Stella, Drapier's Letters, The Battle of the Books, An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, and A Tale of a Tub. Swift is regarded by the Encyclopedia Britannica as the foremost prose satirist in the English language. (Information source-Wikipedia)
8th
May 2014
good
ReplyDelete