"Brian Blair" wrote in
message
...
Its raining here (shower) and the sun is
shining - my pal Jem said the other
day when that happened..

"time for a Monkey's wedding that" - ie when the
sun shines and there is a
shower at the same time then it is time for a
Monkey's wedding

anyone heard that saying?

needless to say whenever this happens i now
remark that it is time for a
monkeys wedding - its hard not to.

brian
monkey's wedding
aberfeldy

First hit on Google give the following

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.
Back in 1998, Bert Vaux, Assistant Professor of
Linguistics at Harvard, asked members of the
LINGUIST List about expressions for this weather
phenomenon (he called it a sunshower, a lovely
name, which I’ve never heard but which I’m told is
common in the US, Canada, Australia and New
Zealand, and also in parts of Britain,
though—oddly enough—it appears in few
dictionaries). He was told that similar sayings or
proverbs exist in a surprising number of
languages. A great many of them have animal
associations, often to do with marriage (or, as
one respondent commented, that activity for which
the word marriage may be considered a suitable
euphemism).
In Arabic, it seems the term is “the rats are
getting married”, while Bulgarians prefer to speak
of bears doing so; Mr Vaux was told that in Hindi
it becomes “the jackal’s wedding”; in Calabria, it
is said that “when it rains with sun, the foxes
are getting married”, for which there’s a similar
phrase in Japanese; Koreans refer to tigers
likewise; there’s even an English dialect term,
“the foxes’ wedding”, known from the south west,
it seems. However, in Polish, the saying is that
“when the sun is shining and the rain is raining,
the witch is making butter”.
Several languages refer to devils instead, as in
Turkish: “the devils are getting married”. There’s
a well-known version in the American South, at
least among older people: “The devil’s behind his
kitchen door beating his wife with a frying pan”,
usually shortened just to “The devil’s beating his
wife”.
With so many examples from different languages, it
is certainly possible that there’s also an Irish
version, though I haven’t come across one.
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?