“Monkey’s Wedding” Sounds Gentler Than “The Devil’s Beating His Wife” for Sunny Rain

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Elizabeth. I’m calling from Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

Well, hello, Elizabeth.

What’s up?

I was calling because there’s a phrase that my mother told me about a long time ago, and I’ve always just wanted to know what on earth it meant.

When there’s rain and sunshine at the same time, she told me that where she grew up in Georgia, people said that was the devil beating his wife.

And never understood what that meant and what connection it had to the weather.

It’s such a strange phrase. Kind of shocking.

It’s very strange. I know that one of my grandmothers would be absolutely scandalized if anyone ever used that phrase around her.

So I’ve just been so curious.

Really? Because of the devil or the wife-beating part?

Probably both, I think.

Oh, really?

Well, that’s the kind of behavior you’d expect of the devil, though, isn’t it?

Yeah.

Yeah, but it is a really striking expression. And there are all kinds of variants of this, too.

You will find things like the devil is beating his wife with a frying pan.

Have you heard that version?

No, I haven’t.

I’ve also seen the devil is beating his wife with a shoulder of mutton.

And another version is the devil is beating his wife and the angels are crying.

Oh, my.

And these are regionally specific or these are just kind of general across the country?

Well, you know, it’s interesting because you will find it often, often in the south.

But you’ll also find versions of it in other countries.

There’s a German one that goes, the devil is beating his grandmother. He laughs and she cries.

Wow.

Yeah, and I think all of these expressions, to me, they have the whiff of some really old folk tale that arose to explain this weird meteorological phenomenon that you’re talking about.

You know, back in the days before people understood how those things work and before they had the kind of consciousness of spousal abuse that we have today.

Right.

In fact, it kind of reminds me of this African folk tale that purports to explain the appearance of the sun and the moon.

There’s this story that the Maasai tribe tells that the sun was married to the moon and they had this knock-down, drag-out fight, the sun being the husband and the moon being the wife.

And the story goes that ever since, the sun shines brightly in shame because he’s got bruises all over his face and he doesn’t want you to see them.

And the moon, on the other hand, shows everyone her swollen lip and her missing eye.

Oh.

That is dramatic.

Yeah, it’s really grisly stuff.

But you can see how that might have developed to explain the weirdness of the sun being up there in the sky and being so dazzling and the moon having all those craters and dark spots.

But, again, I think it’s from a period of time where people didn’t have the same kind of consciousness.

These expressions for when it’s raining and the sun is shining, these exist all around the world.

There’s a big list of these that was collected about 10 years ago by someone on Linguist List, which is a well-known email list for linguists.

And he put the call out. He said, in the cultures that you study, the languages that you record, what is the expression for this?

And it is a fascinating list.

A lot of these have to do with, oddly enough, weddings, a monkey’s wedding, or a hyena’s wedding.

From the Dutch, we have, there’s a fair in hell. They also have the devil beats his wife, or the devil beats his mother.

You have the devil’s kissing his wife in Tennessee. You have just a ton of these.

All strange, strange stuff.

Of course, a lot of people just say things like sun shower.

But in Armenian, it’s a bird’s wedding. In Aramaic, the wolves are getting married. In Arabic, the rats are getting married.

It’s just a ton of these.

We’ll link to this on the website.

But the sun shining and raining at the same time are strange enough that so many languages and so many cultures had to come up with a way to describe them.

Thanks for calling.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

All righty.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, if you’ve got a question about a puzzling expression that your parents or grandparents used that you’ve never been able to figure out, give us a call about it.

The number is 1-877-929-9673 or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.