As with many common English expressions, there is no simple and universally accepted explanation. We know that the expression entered the language in the seventeenth century, but we cannot say for certain what was in the minds of those who first used and popularized it. At any rate, the first recorded use of a variation of this expression appears in a work of the English Playwright Richard Brome, City Wit, which appeared in 1653. "It shall raine," he wrote, "Dogs and Polecats." Polecats? A polecat is a North American name for a skunk, but in Europe was applied to various members of the weasel family.

It was the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift who turned both members of the pair into domestic animals, or at least it was he who first recorded this transformation, in a 1738 work called A Complete Collection of Polite and Ingenious Conversation, where the following sentence appears: "I know Sir John will go, though he was sure it would rain cats and dogs." And we have been using the expression in that form ever since.

But why? What do cats and dogs (or weasels, for that matter) have to do with rain? As usual, where there is no certainty, theories abound, some of them more fanciful than others. To deal with some of the more hare-brained ones first:

In the Middle Ages cats were often identified as the companions, or familiar spirits, of witches, and it has been said that in the popular imagination these cats were able to fly through the air. It is further posited that in Norse mythology dogs were attendants on Odin, the god of storms, and that sailors used to associate cats with wind and dogs with rain, so that if it were raining cats and dogs there would a heavy rainstorm with lots of wind.

The problem with this is that there is no evidence to support any of it: if people ever thought that witches' cats could fly or sailors ever associated cats with wind and dogs with rain, there is absolutely no contemporary record of it. And there is no way to explain the centuries that intervened between the days when belief in witches and the Scandinavian gods was current and the seventeenth century, when the expression suddenly appears in English. Nor is there an explanation for the appearance of the expression only in English: why not in at least one of the Scandinavian languages? why not in any of the other languages of Europe, where belief in witchcraft flourished?

Then there is the explanation that was popularised by one of those humorous e-mail messages that people read and then forward to all of their friends: In 1999 there was one called "Life in the 1500s" (it is reproduced at the following site: http://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/hoaxes/hoaxDetails.asp?HName=Life+in+the+1500s+Hoax or http://...com/2myys6), which gives the following explanation for the expression:

I'll describe their houses a little. You've heard of thatch roofs, well that's all they were. Thick straw, piled high, with no wood underneath. They were the only place for the little animals to get warm. So all the pets; dogs, cats and other small animals, mice, rats, bugs, all lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery so sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof. Thus the saying, "it's raining cats and dogs."

Again, some evidence would be nice. No self-respecting cat (or even a dog, for that matter) would remain on a rooftop during a rainstorm, particularly not on top of the thatch, where it would have to be in order to slip off! An imaginative explanation, in other words, but one that has no connection whatsoever with reality! And again, what could account for the century or so between the time when life was supposedly like this and the first appearance of the expression in English?

The next explanation is somewhat more plausible. According to it, "cats and dogs" is a corruption of the obscure French word catadoupe, a waterfall, itself derived from a similar Greek word with the same meaning. It is true that in some French dialects an s sound can be heard following a t, and it is not inconceivable that the syllable –doupe might be pronounced –doppe in some of the same dialects, so that an unsuspecting anglophone might think he was hearing "cats and dog"—but it is unlikely. The trouble is that the word is obscure: it does not appear, for instance, in either of the desk-size (each between 1500 and 2000 pages long) French-only dictionaries that I regularly consult, even as an obsolete or archaic word. There is no evidence that the word was ever familiar enough, even in France, to get corrupted into a popular English expression

An explanation that I like and one that I find almost persuasive is that the expression comes from the sounds made by the two animals in question when they are fighting with each other: the cat's hisses and yowls might easily be heard in the sound of the howling wind by an imaginative person, and a dog's growls and barks might be heard in the sound of thunder. I would be totally convinced that this was the origin of the expression if I could find even one other language in which this asociation is made, but alas! I cannot. In other languages it rains a great many things (wheelbarrows in Czech, chair legs in Greek, and husbands in Spanish, for example: there is an entertaining list at http://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/rain/htm), but only in English does it rain cats and dogs!

All of which brings us to the explanation most favoured by those who have looked into the question, one which takes as its point of departure the fact that it entered the language in the seventeenth century. Rain. England. The 1600s. Well, we do know that in large English cities, particularly in London, during the seventeenth century the drainage systems were very rudimentary and particularly inefficient, so that a great downpour of rain sent a flood of water surging through the cobblestone streets, and there are contemporary accounts of small animals, such as cats and dogs, being drowned in these floods and carried along on the coursing waters, their corpses scattered around the streets when things dried up again. It is highly doubtful that anyone ever believed that these animals had actually fallen out of the sky during a rainstorm, but one can very easily imagine people coming out of their houses the morning after a storm, seeing the streets littered with the bodies of drowned domestic animals, and exclaiming "I see it rained cats and dogs last night!" Or words to that effect.

Indeed, the first recorded use of the modern form of the expression, in the Swift quotation given above, could very well be a reference by Swift to a poem he had himself written twenty-eight years earlier, in 1710. Written in four unequal stanzas and titled "A Description of a City Shower," it contains the following lines:

Now from all Parts the swelling kennels flow,

And bear their Trophies with them as they go:

Filth of all hues and odours seem to tell

What streets they sailed from, by the sight and smell.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sweepings from butchers stalls, dung, guts, and blood,

Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,

Dead cats and turnip-tops come tumbling down the flood.

The full poem can be found at http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Poetry/Anthology/Swift/DescriptionCity.htm or http://...com/ytmecd. It is well worth reading.

This, then, is the most probable explanation of the expression, but nobody can say for sure. Perhaps, after all, it is no more than an exaggeration of the rain of frogs described in the Bible and indeed observed in nature on several subsequent occasions.

And what of the polecats in the 1653 reference? Well, so far nobody has managed to weasel out an explanation for them!

This posting was suggested by a question asked by ELOF Jean-Philippe Barrette, of the Royal Military College St-Jean, where I teach. If you have a suggestion for a future posting, please leave me a MySpace message or get it to me any other way you can think of!

            I was pretty sure I knew the answer, as a good Quebecer—it has been part of my own repertoire of cuss words for years—but just to be on the safe side I checked with one of my colleagues, Alain Biage, who is a specialist in Quebec French.

            I had thought that only anglophone Quebecers used the expression, but he assures me that it is equally popular among francos. According to him the "correct" expression is "shit de marde", literally shit of shit. The French word for shit, of course, is la merde, but marde is the Quebec variation. A European Frenchman might say "Merde!" if he were upset, but in Quebec this is not considered powerful enough to express a strong emotion: in Quebec French all the really good swear words are sacrilegious, and merde doesn't qualify. Marde, although it means exactly the same thing, is considered much more vulgar, much as in North American English the word arse is considered more vulgar than the word ass--and the Québecois intensifies marde even further by adding the English word shit, which everyone knows is a very bad thing to say in English.

Alain tells me that it is very common in Quebec French, ranking perhaps fifth in popularity among all cuss words. It is somewhat less common in Quebec English, but if you were born here or have lived here long enough, you will eventually find yourself using it! It is a medium-strength oath: stronger that just "Shit!" in English or "Merde!" in French, but not quite as strong as, say, the F-word in English or one of the sacrilegious words in French—and it is nice to have a term that the two linguistic communities—Quebec's "two solitudes"—can and do agree upon!

This article was suggested by a question from Geoff Hart of Pointe-Clare, Quebec. If you have a word or expression that you would like me to research, please do leave me a message, and I'll have a go at it! All suggestions are most gratefully received!

Unlike many, if not most, common expressions, we know exactly where this one came from and what it means. A petard was once (the earliest recorded use of the word dates from 1598, so the device was contemporary with Elizabeth I and Shakespeare) to a type of explosive device. I cite the definition given by Michael Quinion on his World Wide Words Web site (): "A petard was a bell-shaped metal grenade typically filled with five or six pounds of gunpowder and set off by a fuse. Sappers dug a tunnel or covered trench up to a building and fixed the device to a door, barricade, drawbridge or the like to break it open. The bomb was held in place with a heavy beam called a madrier." "Unfortunately," Quinion continues, "the devices were unreliable and often went off unexpectedly." When such an accident occurred, the unlucky sapper carrying the petard was blown sky-high instead of the obstacle it was meant to remove: he was lifted into the air, or hoisted, by his own petard!

So why do we say hoist instead of using the past-participle –ed form, which we would expect in such a construction (in the previous sentence, for example, I wrote "the . . . sapper was blown sky-high" and "he was lifted into the air," not "he was blow" or "he was lift")? It is because the expression comes to us directly from the pen of Shakespeare. At the end of Act 3 of Hamlet, the prince learns that his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are to accompany him to England, bearing instructions that he is to be put to death by the English king when he gets there, and we learn that he has devised a plot whereby the messengers will themselves be the victims of the instructions they carry:

For 'tis the sport to have the enginer

Hoist with his own petard, and 't shall go hard

But I will delve one yard below their mines

And blow them at the moon.

So the expression is a quotation, and as such we retain Shakespeare's odd (to our ears) sense of the word hoist as well as his lack of adherence to the rules of modern English grammar. The expression is, in other words, what grammarians call a set phrase: one that is not subject to the ordinary laws of grammar. Curious that we should treat hoist in this manner, but are not always so respectful when it comes to the rest of the phrase: one often hears "hoist on or by his own petard" when Shakespeare clearly wrote with!

Amusingly, the word petard derives from the French verb péter, which in turn comes from the Latin petar, to break wind (fart). Presumably the explosive device was so named because of the muffled sound made by an explosive that is detonated at the end of a long tunnel! Language can be scatological at times, often in the most unexpected places!

Please submit suggestions for future postings!

Yes, it is tenterhooks, not, as one sometimes hears, tender hooks!

The term comes from the process of making woollen cloth. After the cloth has been woven, it still contains impurities, such as oil from the fleece, pieces of grass or other plants, and some dirt. To remove these impurities, the cloth is cleaned, a process that was previously carried out in a fulling mill, where the cloth was washed with a material designed to absorb or dissipate the oils, such as fuller's earth or soap, then rinsed with water and beaten with wooden hammers to make the fibres mat together and give the cloth strength. It then had to be dried, but carefully, in order to prevent or minimize shrinking.

This was done by stretching the wet cloth on a large wooden frame that has been known in English since at least the fourteenth century as a tenter, a word that ultimately derives from the Latin word tendere, to stretch: a fourteenth-century manuscript cited by the OED tells us that Christ was nailed to the cross as men stretch cloth upon a tenter (spelled teyntur). This was a large wooden frame with a row of nails (each driven part-way into the frame and then bent at a ninety-degree angle) all around its perimeter. The edges of the length of cloth were secured to the frame with these bent nails, or tenterhooks, and the tenters were then set outside so the cloth could dry but would still retain its size and shape. The earliest recorded use of the word tenterhooks in this sense was in 1480, when it appeared with the spelling Tentourhokes.

What an apt image for a person who is full of anxiety or expectation: it is as if his nerves have been pulled taut, putting his entire being in tension, as he hangs suspended awaiting the outcome! This figurative sense is also quite old: in 1532 Sir Thomas More wrote, in The Confutation of Barnes, "The churche . . . is stretched out in the stretcher or tenter hooks of the crosse, as a churche well washed and cleansed." Here, however, while the use is figurative, it is still firmly connected to the original meaning of the word. The modern sense of the word, completely divorced, in the minds of most people, from the image which it conveys, seems to have been established in the language by the time of the English novelist Tobias Smollett, who wrote in 1748 "I left him upon the tenter-hooks of impatient uncertainty," and by 1812 it was no longer thought necessary to specify the state of mind that results in being so distressed: in that year Sir Robert T. Wilson wrote in his diary "Until I reach the imperial headquarters I shall be on tenter-hooks." The word assumed its modern form, without the hyphen, in the issue of The Saturday Review for December 25, 1897, where a reviewer notes "The author keeps . . . the reader . . . on tenterhooks."

In art and in the Christian liturgy green is the symbol of rebirth, resurrection, and hope. Indeed, in Catholic ritual green vestments are worn on more days than vestments of any other colour, so green might be said to express the normal, everyday state of the Christian, who lives in "sure and certain hope of the resurrection." So how does it happen that in English-speaking cultures (among others) the colour green has also come to signify jealousy or envy?

            The answer seems to go back to ancient Greece, where a pale or greenish colour was associated with illness. The seventh-century Greek poet Sappho used to it somewhat figuratively to describe the complexion of the rejected suitor in one of her poems. As time went by green came to be particularly associated with illnesses thought to have been caused by an excess of bile, an excess that was also thought to be responsible for the emotion of jealousy. In Book I of his Confessions Saint Augustine speaks of a child being green with jealousy at the sight of his sibling nursing at their mother's breast.

This belief survived until relatively modern times, and was certainly current during the age of Shakespeare, who coined the expression "green-eyed monster." Shakespeare equated green with jealousy three times, the earliest being in The Merchant of Venice (1596): "How all the other passions fleet to air,/as doubtful thoughts and rash-embraced despair,/and shuddering fear and green-eyed jealousy!" (act 3, scene 2). Jealousy is green-eyed, presumably, because the eyes are windows of the soul and the soul of a jealous person is coloured by an excess of bile. When Shakespeare next uses this image, however, he chooses to play with it. What else has green eyes? Why, cats, of course, and so jealously becomes a green-eyed cat, torturing its victim before destroying it utterly: "O beware, my lord, of jealousy;/ it is the green-eyed monster which doth mock/the meat it feeds on." (Othello, 3,3). Othello is possibly the most famous investigation of the operation and effects of jealousy in any language. Shakespeare's third use of the conceit is in Antony and Cleopatra, where he refers to jealousy as the green sickness.

Germans turn yellow with jealousy rather than green, and the Swedish word for jealousy is svartsjuka, literally black sickness, but thanks to Shakespeare the speaker of English will always view jealousy as the "green-eyed monster" and we will no doubt continue to turn green with envy.

In the symbolism of art and literature, blue has always signified the soul, or spirituality, and in religious iconography, as in heraldry, the colour blue denotes faith or fidelity. This is why, for instance, representations of the Virgin Mary always show her wearing a blue mantle or cloak, and the expression "true blue" means loyal or faithful even to death. And then there is the concept of blue blood, a supposed characteristic of the nobility or aristocracy: European aristocrats, particularly aristocratic women, were seldom exposed to the full strength of the sun and consequently had very pale skin, through which the blue veins were much more apparent than in the ruddier complexions of the common people. But what does any of this have to do with the defining characteristic of blue jokes and blue movies?

The standard dictionaries, even the illustrious OED, all tell us what blue means in such expressions, but they do not tell us why. And at this date, almost two centuries after the first recorded use of blue in this context, it is impossible to say for sure where the meaning came from. It seems, however, to have come into currency in the early nineteeth century: on his Website (http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-blu2.htm), highly respected word sleuth Michael Quinion notes what is probably its earliest appearance in print, in an 1824 publication called The Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopedia, by John McTaggart, which defines "thread o' blue" as "any little smutty touch in song-singing, chatting, or piece of writing." At the end of that century, in 1898, E. Cobham Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable suggests a possible origin: apparently there existed in France a series of pornographic books called la Bibliothèque bleu (the Blue Library), so called because they contained the type of stories that could be heard in bordellos, from the lips of prostitutes. In those days in France, apparently, the customary attire for women who were imprisoned for prostitution was a blue gown; hence, a prostitute came to be known as a blue, and stories typical of prostitutes as blue stories. If based on verifiable facts, this meaning of "blue story" is particularly apposite: the word pornography itself comes from two Greek works meaning the depiction in writing of harlots.

We no longer restrict the word pornography to the written media, applying it with equal ease to drawing, painting, photography, and the cinema, so it is logical to assume that a thread o' blue progressed easily from blue talk, blue songs, and blue stories to blue movies, which certainly did not exist is the 1820s. But Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue) suggests another origin for the last term: "Blue movie" it says, is "a term used for a pornographic film because early pornographic films in black and white were often shot on inferior grade film which made them look bluish." This sentence is flagged on the Wikipedia site as one that needs documentation, and indeed it does; otherwise the meaning of blue here is too similar to its meaning in older expressions to make a separate derivation seem likely.

When I mused aloud on this question at a Christmas dinner several years ago, I was informed by my hostess, a native of Nova Scotia, that real mincemeat did indeed contain meat—usually venison or moose—and that the version we know with currants, raisins, sugar, suet, apples, almonds, candied peel, etc. was but a lame attempt to reproduce the flavour of the original dish concocted by an age in which meat, and particularly game meat, was either more expensive or more difficult to come by. And indeed, on a subsequent Christmas I was served a portion of pie that was made of mincemeat containing minced moose meat, as a great delicacy. It was good, but it was not extraordinarily good, and I would not go out of my way to have it again.

This past Christmas, as I filled my own pie shell with meatless mincemeat imported from England, I decided to do some fact-checking.

According to the OED, mincemeat is derived from the purely descriptive minced meat. Hardly any surprise there. The verb to mince means to cut up into small pieces, and indeed in Britain what we call ground meat or hamburger is still called mince: a fact that seems to support the theory that mincemeat originally contained meat, especially when one considers that mincemeat pie often goes by the name mince pie. It is a very old word, having entered English (from French and ultimately Latin, where it had the form minutia) early in the fifteenth century. A variant spelling was minch.

Mincemeat and mincemeat pie are much later: not, like so many of our Christmas traditions, Victorian, but dating from the mid-eighteenth century. So did it or did it not contain meat in the modern sense? The word meat, after all, can refer not only to the flesh of animals but also to the flesh of fruit, nuts, etc. (a meaning the OED dates from the early fifteenth century) or even to food in general (the earliest meaning listed by the OED, dating from around 900). It seems that the answer is "Sometimes yes, sometimes no": i.e., that meat was a common but by no means essential ingredient. One of the sources cited by the OED for its definition of mince pie is an 1889 publication called (North-West Lincolnshire Glossary), which indicates that the old variant spelling minch survived well into the nineteenth century in at least that part of England, where it coexisted with the modern spelling but carried a slightly different meaning: "It is said that mince-pies and minch-pies are not quite the same. Minch-pies, we are told, have meat in their composition; mince-pies have not." The words "not quite" are significant: they suggest that the two dishes were identical except for the presence or absence of meat. As the meatless variety became the more common one, the minch spelling variation also disappeared. Indeed, the OED's definition of mincemeat, as well as listing the usual ingredients, includes the words "and sometimes meat."

None of which has anything to do, of course, with my least favourite staple of British cooking, a dish known a savoury mince. Trust me, you do not want to go there!

If anyone has a suggestion for a future posting, please leave me a MySpace message; it will be much appreciated!

Why do we say . . . eggnog? Is there any other kind of nog? What is nog or a nog anyway?

The OED says that eggnog (variant spellings are eggnogg and eggnoggy) is a combination of egg and nog, the latter word designating strong ale, and gives the date of its earliest recorded use as 1825. This seems to have been a mixture of eggs and beer, and to have evolved over the following century and a half or so into the customary modern mixture of eggs, milk or cream, flavorings, and alcohol, usually, in our time, rum or brandy. The same dictionary elaborates a bit in its definition of nog, which it says is "a kind of strong beer brewed in East Anglia," dating the earliest use of that word to 1693. This perhaps gives us a clue to where eggnog originated: East Anglia is the part of England, to the north of London, that includes the cities of Norwich, Ipswich, Cambridge, Peterborough, and Colchester. The name eggnog may have survived its extension over a wider area and the alteration of its alcoholic constituent from beer to liquor because of the similarity of the word nog to noggin, one of the meanings of which is "a small quantity of liquor, usually a quarter of a pint" (also, curiously enough, dating from 1693). That would be a quarter of an imperial pint, or five fluid ounces: a rather stiff shot to add to a glass of eggnog, but not unthinkable if a bowl of eggnog is being mixed rather than a glass.

I have no idea how well-known or popular this yuletide beverage is outside of English-speaking countries, but it is sold commercially here in Quebec, at least, under the delightfully imaginative French name lait de poule (hen's milk)!

I raise my glass of holiday cheer to all who read this blog, wishing you a Happy New Year and hoping to hear your suggestions for future postings!

There was a time, extending until not so very long ago, when the mark of a good education was proficiency in Greek and Latin: Shakespeare's rival playwright, Ben Jonson, disparaged Shakespeare as someone who had "little Latin and less Greek," and anyone familiar with novels set in nineteenth-century English public schools is familiar with the struggles of successive generations to master these two classical languages. It is not surprising, then, that we should find a few words and expressions in English that are mock Latin or mock Greek: rather plain or even ludicrous concepts dressed up in classical garb to sound mock serious or mock scholarly. An example of such an expression is the still rather frequently found non illegitimi carborundum: don't let the bastards grind you down. Holus-bolus is another.

According to the OED, holus-bolus (also spelled as one word or two without a hyphen) is mock Latin for "the whole bolus," bolus (or bolos) being a Greek word meaning a clod or lump, originally of soil but eventually applied to all manner of things. The Greek word was introduced into English all on its own relatively early: the first usage recorded by the OED is dated 1603, the year in which Queen Elizabeth 1 died, when it meant a rather largish pill, of a rounded shape to facilitate swallowing. Before too long it was being used figuratively: in 1637 the Earl of Monmouth observed "Cruell actions are so many bolus, which are never better taken than when wrapt up in gold." By this time the non-figurative bolus apparently designated much the same thing as the modern expression "a sugar-coated pill."

Bolus continued to be used on its own well into the nineteenth century; a rather late example (1878) is found in the writings of William Black: "Resolved not to swallow your Home Rule bolus." But by that time it was on its way out, being supplanted by the mock-Latin form holus-bolus, which seems to have made its earliest appearance in print in 1847 but really picked up steam ten years later, with the appearance of the first of Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown novels, Tom Brown's School Days, which describes life at the famous Rugby public school in England: the opening chapter contains these words: "As we say in the Vale, holus-bolus just as it comes."

In our time, early in the twenty-first century, the frivolous, mock Latin form has completely replaced the Greek loan word bolus. Strange, when Latin and Greek are no longer the banes of a young scholar's existence and most of us, like Shakespeare, have "little Latin and less Greek": a whole lot less, I suspect, than the Bard himself!

This is a short essay I wrote a couple of years back in response to a comment made by a good friend in our personal correspondence.

Un lis (or lys), of course, is a lily. But just look at the thing:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/29/Héraldique_meuble_Fleur_de_lys_lissée.svg/250px-Héraldique_meuble_Fleur_de_lys_lissée.svg.png

That has never struck me as resembling any lily that I know of. Used to puzzle me when I was a kid, and I thought that they must have very strange lilies indeed in France. The ones I knew look like this:

http://freepages.family.rootsweb.com/~soakbear/my-lily.jpg.

No resemblance! Then I noticed that the fleur de lys is the provincial flower of Quebec, but when it is pictured it is sometimes a lily, sometimes an iris:

http://www.newt.com/wohler/events/san-pedro-2006/douglas-iris-big.jpg

Is the resemblance to the stylized version not much more evident? So how does it happen that it is called a lily when it is obvious to me that it is no such thing? Lilies and irises do not even belong to the same family.

I am not alone in finding the appellation strange: The recent book 1001 Symbols begins its entry for the fleur de lis as follows: "The fleur de lis, a highly stylized lily looking more like a bearded iris, became the emblem of the French royal house in the twelfth century [. . .]" (103). Long before Linnaeus, in other words. Is it possible that in mediaeval France the iris was considered to be a type of lily, much in the same way that the Swedes still call daffodils påskliljor (literally Easter lilies)? More than possible, as it turns out. Turning to the entry for iris in Signs and Symbols in Christian Art, one learns

The iris, rival of the lily as the flower of the Virgin, first appears as a religious symbol in the works of the early Flemish masters, where it both accompanies and replaces the lily in pictures of the Virgin. This symbolism stems from the fact that the name 'iris' means 'sword lily', which was taken as an allusion to the sorrow of the Virgin at the Passion of Christ. (32)

Obviously the statement that iris means "sword lily" is nonsense—the name comes from the Greek word for rainbow—but I take this to mean that in mediaeval times irises were called sword lilies (the biblical reference is to Luke 2: 35, where Simeon addresses Mary with these words: "Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also [. . .]"). And it does not take too much imagination to see the fleur de lys emblem as a stylized sword.

At any rate, all of this comes together in another recent book, Treasury of Flower Lore:

[The yellow flag iris] and other species of iris have been referred to as fleur-de-lis or fleur-de-luce and according to legend, during the sixth century the army of King Clovis of France escaped defeat at the hands of the Goths by fording the River Rhine where they noticed the yellow flag growing towards the centre—indicating shallow water. Having prayed for victory to the god of his Christian wife, Clothilde, he adopted her faith and in gratitude, changed his emblem of three toads on his banner to three iris flowers, the iris being dedicated to the Virgin Mary. It is also known as the lily of France—this is because both irises and daffodils were often referred to as lilies in earlier times. In the twelfth century Louis VII of France adopted the flower as the emblem on his shield during the Crusades. (71)

And that, to my mind, settles it!

Afterword: curiously, my French-only dictionary of choice was not very helpful in its definitions of either fleur de lis/lys or lis, but I just looked up iris and found this note, which confirms what is said above: "L'iris sauvage pousse dans les lieux humides. La fleur-de-lis serait la stylisation d'un iris sauvage européen, l'iris des marias (Iris pseudacorus) à fleurs jaunes."

Works Cited:

Addison, Josephine. Treasury of Flower Lore. Illus. Cherry Hillhouse. London: Bloomsbury,1997.

Ferguson, George. Signs and Symbols in Christian Art. 1954. London: OUP, 1961.

Poirier, Claude et al., edd. Dictionaire du français Plus: à l'usage des francophones d'Amérique. Montreal: Centre educatif et culturel, 1988.

Tresidder, Jack. 1001 Symbols: An Illustrated Key to the World of Symbols. London: Duncan Baird, 2003.