It is not the first time that it has rained since 15 July, but it would definitely be fair to call these last three weeks dry, rather than wet.
So much for St Swithin & his confident prediction that the rain that fell on his day meant continuous rain for forty days thereafter.
Well we knew that his forecast is not always right, but Jeremy Plester (standing in for Paul Simons in The Times Weather Eye column the other day) raised the possibility that perhaps forty did/does not always mean forty, but simply a lot. He particularly mentions the supposed forty days & forty nights of Noah’s Flood.
The OED puts the definite meaning of forty as ‘The cardinal numeral equal to four tens, represented by the symbols 40 or xl’ firmly in first place & its earliest recorded English use in the 960 Lindisfarne Gospel’s rendition of Jesus fast of forty days & forty nights in Matthew 4.2
The OED does record forty being used indefinitely to express a large number, but not before Shakespeare’s Coriolanus in 1616.
According to the website Meaning of Numbers in the Bible, forty has long been universally recognized as an important number, both on account of the frequency of its occurrence, and the uniformity of its association with a period of probation, trial, and chastisement.
Well that certainly applies to forty days of rain, but why are we also offered the prospect of forty days of sunshine whenever we get one particular sunny day in the middle of July.
Link
Meaning of Numbers in the Bible
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Counting in the Bible
Forty days
Meaning of Numbers in the Bible
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Counting in the Bible
Forty days
