In New York we used to say “The Donald is fixing his hair.”

Dear Word Detective: Why do we call a sunshower “a monkey’s wedding”? — Milo Chow.

Good question. One of the advantages of living in the middle of nowhere in Flatland (the US Midwest), as I do, is that you can step outside and see the sky right down to the horizon in nearly any direction. So, given the lack of better things to do, I spend an inordinate amount of time looking at the sky. It’s actually pretty neat. You can see thunderstorms fifty miles away, the most breathtakingly beautiful cloud formations imaginable, and, on a clear night, the Milky Way stretching across the entire sky. Plus, of course, all the meteorites and UFOs. It’s all very magnificent, although it’s debatable whether it really makes up for the dearth of edible pizza around here.

One cool thing we see fairly frequently are “sun-dogs” (parhelia, from the Greek “para,” beside, plus “helios,” sun), bright fragments of rainbows that form in the sky on either side of the sun when it’s low in the sky and shining through ice crystals in the upper atmosphere. They’ve been called “sun-dogs” since about 1635, but no one knows why. I suspect that it’s because they accompany the sun like faithful dogs.

The word “sunshower” seems to be missing from most major dictionaries, which is odd, given that it’s a fairly common meteorological phenomenon. A “sunshower” occurs when it’s raining (“showering”) where you are, but the sun is also shining on you. A sunshower usually happens when the sun is fairly low in the sky and the rain is coming from an isolated batch of clouds directly above.

Sunshowers, while not exactly a frequent event, are not terribly rare anywhere on earth. What makes sunshowers especially interesting, however, is the fact that nearly every human culture has its own term for the phenomenon. More remarkably, many of these terms “explain” the event as being an indication of either the devil or various animals doing something, usually either fighting or getting married. The animals in these terms are almost always central figures in the folklore of the culture, frequently the “trickster” character of legends, an animal with human intelligence who either triumphs over danger through use of their wits or outsmarts the local humans and wreaks havoc on social mores.

Back in 1998, Harvard linguist Bert Vaux posted a query about such sunshower terms to the Linguist email discussion list and, a month later, posted the remarkable results of his survey. “A monkeys’ wedding” is, for instance, a well-known term in South African English, apparently a direct translation of the Zulu “umshado wezinkawu.” In many languages (including Bulgarian, Finnish, Italian, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese and English), however, the animal getting married is the fox. In Arabic, “the rats are getting married,” while in Hindi it’s “the jackals” that are the lucky couple. The Koreans speak of “the tiger” getting hitched.

The devil also figures in many “sunshower” phrases, although he’s not always getting married. In the southern US, a rain/sun moment prompts the observation that “the devil is beating his wife,” a more elaborate version of which (“When it rains when it shines, the devil’s beating his wife with a codfish”) has been heard in Yorkshire, England. A more harmonious version (“The devil’s kissing his wife”) is said to be common in Tennessee. The devil fighting with his wife is also popular in Hungarian and Dutch. Witches, not to be left out, pop up around the world dancing, making butter, or making bread in the rain. Evidently witches also get married in Spain. In Greece they say “the poor people are getting married,” but they also say “the Bulgarians are getting married,” so there may be a story there.

As to why these phrases are so common across so many disparate cultures around the world, I think there are several factors. Sentient animals are, of course, common in folklore, and thus, along with gods, devils and the like, have often figured in folk explanations of natural phenomena. But even in cultures where folklore persists only as a cultural memory, beliefs once taken seriously are often offered as jocular answers to inquisitive children. I remember my mother telling me, when I was very young, that thunder is the sound of giants bowling in the sky. She wasn’t serious, of course, and even then I didn’t really believe her, but in telling me that she helped preserve a charming fable. It would have been cooler, however, if she’d said it was giant monkeys bowling.

Please stand by. Or run. Your choice.

Dear Word Detective: Can you tell me about the origin of the phrase “hang fire”? — Neil Jones.

Sure, but you’ll have to sit through a brief disquisition on my TV viewing habits first. Bear with me; it’s relevant. Judging by your email address, you’re in Australia, so you may not get The History Channel, one of the more popular basic cable channels up here. It used to be known as “the Hitler Channel” because whenever you tuned in you saw Panzers rolling into Poland, but THC has diversified in recent years with “reality” shows. One of them, Pawn Stars, is set in a Las Vegas pawn shop where people attempt to unload some seriously weird old stuff. A few days ago I caught a rerun in which the guys at the shop acquired a 1750 blunderbuss (a primitive shotgun, from the Dutch “donderbus,” thunder gun) and then attempted to fire it. The first two tries didn’t work, apparently because the powder in the external “pan” under the hammer didn’t flash through the little hole at the base of the barrel to set off the main charge. The third try was very loud.

Those initial attempts to fire the blunderbuss were a perfect illustration of the origin of “hang fire,” which the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines in the literal sense as “(of a firearm) to be slow in communicating the fire through the vent to the charge.” The term itself is just about as old as that blunderbuss, first found in print (so far) in 1782 (“In consequence of which the piece is slower in going off, or, as sportsmen term it, is apt to hang fire.”). Since “hanging fire,” failing or balking at firing, was a problem in all firearms that used an external spark to ignite the main charge (including cannons aboard warships), the phrase may well have been in use for decades before it showed up in print.

The “hang” in “hang fire” is our common verb “to hang,” meaning “to suspend” in a variety of senses, used here in a figurative sense of “to hold in a state of inaction,” the same sense we use in the phrase “hung jury,” meaning a jury unable to reach a verdict. “Hang fire” can also mean “to delay something that was expected to happen,” since a gun like a blunderbuss or musket that “hangs fire” may fire on its own in a moment or two (making such weapons inherently dangerous to use).

“Hang fire” has been used in figurative senses since the early 1800s in the sense of “to be delayed or be slow to happen” (“Leyden’s Indian journey ?. seems to hang fire,” Sir Walter Scott, 1801), and it has usually been used in reference to something that would reasonably have been expected to happen, but did not, at an appointed time (“A book produced anonymously hung fire for six weeks,” 1892). The phrase is still very much in use (“Key rail projects hang fire as MMRDA holds back funds,” Indian Express, 2011), and is sometimes used to mean “hold off” or “deliberately delay an action” (“Alexis Jordan wants to be a role model but realises she needs to hang fire,” Daily Star (UK)). Such usage gives the phrase a voluntary connotation it lacks in its literal “fail to fire” origin; there’s a big difference between pulling the trigger of a gun and having nothing happen and deciding not to fire it in the first place.

A historically related but quite different phrase is “flash in the pan,” originally referring to a similar situation where the powder in the “pan” of a flintlock firearm “flashes” just fine, but the main charge fails to ignite. “Flash in the pan” has been used figuratively since the late 17th century to mean something that attracts great public notice but has no lasting effect or success (“These were flash-in-the-pan early Nineties pop stars who combined European dance music with tints of R&B and afro-Caribbean pop,” 2011). Unlike something that “hangs fire,” a “flash in the pan” attracts attention at least at the outset, even if it turns out to be, in the lingo of the recording industry, a “one-hit wonder.”