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monkey's wedding

noun

Etymology

Perhaps patterned after the Portuguese casamento de rapôsa, literally "vixen's wedding", used in the same sense. The Portuguese phrase may have been changed to casamento de macaco, "monkey's wedding", in Portugal's southern African colonies. Alternatively, it may have entered South African English from the Zulu phrase umshado we zinkawu, which literally means "wedding for monkeys".

  1. derived from casamento de rapôsa

Definitions

  1. A sun shower.

    • "Hullo, there's a monkey's wedding," said my wife's niece, a girl of about twenty, born in South Africa […] She was looking out on the lawn, and it was one of those lovely April mornings with sunshine and rain alternating[…]
    • She went on to supply a series of vague remarks until he was not listening: that […] the rain that afternoon had been a real monkey's wedding, half storm, half sunshine.
    • "Look, it's a monkey's wedding!" Ba exclaimed, using a well-known South African expression referring to rain and sunshine occurring at the same time, and admiring the eerie effect of rain falling through a burst of sunshine.

The neighborhood

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sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA