Bootless cats, curious idioms, and Kattegat

Over the years, I have discussed the origin of quite a few animal names. Despite my inroads, most of them—from heifer to dog—remain problematic. Yet no word is more enigmatic than cat. Two names for cat dominate the world: either some variant of kat or miu ~ mau (Ancient Egyptian) ~ mao (Chinese). Apparently, cats mewed ~ meowed in the remotest past, just as they do today. But the origin of the word cat is unknown, in contradistinction to puss, which may be onomatopoeic (sound imitative: compare the word piss). The word seems to have migrated to Eurasia from Africa, a statement that won’t surprise those who have heard something about the history of cats in Ancient Egypt. As far as etymology is concerned, we can only say with some certainty that cat has always referred to the domesticated cat, while at least in Latin, the name for the wild cat was fēlēs (hence English feline “related to cats”). The origin of fēlēs is also unknown (perhaps a borrowing from a lost Alpine language).

In folklore, cats are often evil, but benign examples are also known. Puss in Boots is the third son’s helper, and it is, most probably, for this reason, the friendly pet made its way to English folklore and assumed the role of Dick Whittington’s savior. (See a monument to Dick in the header of this post.) Since cats do not hunt rats and since one cat could not possibly kill hundreds of rats, it has been suggested that one of Whittington’s ship was called “Cat.” I will quote a passage from a letter by William Cole, an eighteenth-century antiquarian: “The commerce this worthy gentleman carried on was chiefly confined to our coasts. For this purpose, he constructed a vessel, which, for its agility and lightness, he aptly christened a cat. Nay, to this our day, gentlemen, all our coals from Newcastle are imported by nothing but cats. From thence it appears, that it was not the whiskered, four-footed, mouse-killing cat, that was the source of the magistrate’s wealth; but the coasting, sailing, coal-carrying Cat: that, gentlemen, was Whittington’s cat” (Notes and Queries, 2^nd Series, N. 32, August 9, 1856, p. 117).

This is a clever hypothesis, but, to use James A. H. Murray’s favorite phrase, it is at odds with chronology. The real Dick Whittington, whose biography is known reasonably well, died in 1453, while, according to the OED, the earliest attestation of the nautical sense of cat does not antedate 1799, and the ship did not get its name because it resembled the familiar pet. There is, of course, a beam, “the tackle used for hoisting the anchor to the cat-head,” known as the cat-tackle. It projects from the bows of the ship, called cat head. Yet nothing connects this object with the supposed name of Dick Whittington’s vessel, allegedly (!), sailing to distant lands.

It is amazing how many idioms celebrate cats. Some, for example, to let the cat out of the bag have been explained reasonably well. A few such have figured in this blog. See the posts for March 21, 2007; July 22, 2015, and February 15, 2017 (the latter on the grinning Cheshire cat, and in this context, I cannot help citing the phrase enough to make a cat laugh.) Even forgetting about bags, we can see that cats find themselves in all kinds of strange places. To cast the cat in the kirn (the date for it in my database is 1868) seems to refer to a desired situation (kirn is the northern variant of churn, a vessel or machine for making butter). Presumably, a cat will enjoy being inside such a vessel! Walter Scott knew the idiom, and we read in Chapter 35 of his novel The Monastery (1820) that …it is ill done to teach the cat the way to the kirn, meaning approximately that it is wrong to teach one’s grandmother to suck eggs or to teach a fish how to swim. Yet in 1889, an American cited the phrase cat in the cream pot, almost identical to the previous one, but stated that it meant “a row [that is, a noisy disturbance] in the house”!

Not improbably, such idioms tend to circulate in the community, with no one knowing for sure what they mean, and more or less arbitrary interpretations appear and even stay. Perhaps the most often discussed phrase featuring cat is it is raining cats and dogs. If the suggestion I favor is correct, cats and dogs in that idiom do not refer to animals. Those interested in my ideas will find an explanation in the first of the posts mentioned above, in the post for November 13, 2019, and in my book Take my Word for It (at lie doggo).

Many idioms referring to cats are widely known, for instance, that cat won’t jump, curiosity killed the cat, and so forth, while others may be misleading, like kitty-corner (from), which contains no reference to cats. The most amazing cat phrase I know is dog my cats, a synonym of blow me down with a feather, that is, an exclamation of utter surprise. I first saw dog my cats in David Copperfield and later in Mark Twain and O. Henry but never heard it in real life. The idiom is an ideal case of teaching students grammar: dog is a verb (an imperative), while cats is a noun.

Despite the near-ubiquity of syllables kot, cat, and the like in the name of the cat, many more variants exist. One of them is puss. It has counterparts in Germanic, Celtic, Baltic, and elsewhere. As suggested above, it may be sound-imitative. The German scholar M. T. E. Seitz and the British linguist Alan S. C. Ross published impressive lists of the words for “cat” all over the world. The variety of names is astounding. Numerous verbs for “bending” sound like kat (because the cat tends to arch its back), but cica, kisa, kot, beku, and many, many others abound too. Incidentally, words used for calling animals is also an extremely interesting chapter in the study of etymology. I don’t know how proficient Russian cats become in Russian, but they react to kis-kis-kis.

By way of postscript, I would like to mention an old hypothesis for what it is worth. The name of the strait Kattegat is usually explained as meaning “cat’s gate,” with reference to the animal’s arched back. In 1940, W. Kaspers suggested in Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung 67, pp. 218-19, that the reference in such place names as Kattegat, Katwik, Katwijk, Kattsund, and quite a few others is not to the cat but to the boomerang-like weapon, known in Latin as cateia. Though the origin of the word cateia is obscure, medieval descriptions show that this weapon did look like a boomerang, a bent or angular device. I am not a specialist in this area, but my experience shows that such stray notes are easily lost in the never-ceasing torrent of publications, and worthwhile ideas are sometimes disregarded. If Kasper’s hypothesis is known and has been refuted (no refutation came my way), sorry, but if it is reasonable and forgotten, then, as Captain Cuttle taught us, “when found, make a note of.” And a final flourish: if you never heard Rossini’s “Duetto bufo di duo gatti,” this is the right time to do so.

PS. Thank you for sending me questions. There were two of them. 1. The name Ernest is indeed derived from the adjective earnest. 2. Hunks “miser” is an obsolete word, though still current in some dialects. I cannot remember where I saw it for the first time and why it attracted my attention.

_{Featured image by Internet Archive Book Images via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.}