When hell rains and the sun shines
'The devil is beating his wife.' It's a Southern idiom with a foggy backstory.
The rains have come this spring, and some of the drops have been dappled by sunshine. Which brings up an idiom you know if you grew up here: when sun and rain arrive together, we say "the devil is beating his wife."
You hear it as a child, and you accept it. Even one RedEye writer's Indian mother used it—she must have picked it up in Baton Rouge, because the phrase runs deep in the South in a way it doesn't much anywhere else.
Meteorologists have a tidy explanation: rain falls from one cloud while sunlight breaks through another part of the sky. The origin of the idiom, though, is foggy. A similar line turns up in a 1703 French play, and related sayings appear in old European weather lore, according to Mental Floss.
Somehow, the phrase is bound up with Louisiana and other southern states, where dramatic weather and dramatic language always find each other. (Southern Living has compiled a list of 37 things Southerners say about the weather.)
Many cultures have their own explanations for the sunshower—foxes getting married, witches dancing, some trickster stirring up mischief. The common thread is that sunshine and rain together feel like a contradiction, one strange enough to inspire clever and sometimes unsettling stories to explain it.
