Thursday 9 October 2008

Some More Random Selections From The Cat Dictionary

CATGUT
The quality of feline true grit in the face of adversity (e.g. managing to stoically wait out the twenty minutes between the biscuit dispenser becoming empty and your human serf abandoning his overdue, half-finished piece of journalism to hotfoot it down to the pet store for replacement supplies).

DSDASIGHGDSHSDDC
Feline scholars are split upon estimating when the ancient language of dsdasighgdshsddc first emerged. Some put the date around about 1983, during the rise of the BBC Micro and the ZX Spectrum. Others claim that techno geek cats in San Francisco's South Park district were communicating in it as far back as 1974. Whatever the case, it is generally agreed that dsdasighgdshsddc has been in regular use since the early 90s. While often written off by humans as a random, unintentional series of letters generated by the patter of mischievous paws across a keyboard, what many people don't know is that dsdasighgdshsddc actually forms an entire exclamatory, often insult-heavy, feline language: a kind of profane moggy binary, if you like, being sent to other cats across the globe via a complex email system invisible to the human eye. Popular examples of dsdasighgdshsddc "dissing" include auoagfoylhgo ("Eat my tail scum!") and oiaiuhagiuggghafug ("Your mum was a Griffon Bruxellois!"). Of course, with the rise of the Internet, dsdasighgdshsddc has evolved, mutated and, some would claim, been irrevocably dumbed down. For example, jhjdhjdhdddddddvvvd ("Oh my god! How much do I want my owner to get off this computer and let me pad his stomach!") is now lazily abbreviated by many Generation Y cats to to a simpler, less poetic jhdvvvvd.

GRUDGIN
A half-hearted version of the Nuggin (see Random Selections From The Cat Dictionary Part One), The Grudgin more often than not marks a bargain between cat and owner: "I am feeling too bored/self-important/generally unarsed to push the side of my nose into your hand, but will do so, half-heartedly, knowing that this is the price one must pay for leftover, past-its-sell-by-date honey-glazed turkey."

LITEBEER
The kind of middling, tepid water still bafflingly placed by humans for cats in a combination of receptacles all over the globe, in spite of empirical evidence suggesting that the favourite tipple of most felines is a) water straight from the tap (see below for demonstration from Bootsy), or b) stagnant pond soup, seasoned with the death juice of as many tiny creatures as possible. It is felt by many cats that the continuing marketing of Litebeer encapsulates humans' overall failure to understand a fundamental fact of feline nature: that cats are animals of extremes, unwilling to accept the middle-ground and eternally fearful of the mediocre.

SATAN'S COAL
The one dried, blackened gribbly bit at the bottom of the food bowl that a cat will always leave behind, no matter how hungry it seems to be before (or after) feeding time. The legend of Satan's Coal, which hasn't got anything to do with coal whatsoever, goes all the way back to the time when Osiris, a farm cat in 18th Century Yorkshire, found a nugget of dried shrew corpse on the floor of a neighbour's barn that had been mysteriously ignored by whichever animal had caught it. So moggy folkore says, Osiris was "dared" to eat the tempting nugget by a local witch's cat, and subsequently keeled over and died. Even pragmatic, hardheaded cats who view the story of Satan's Coal as "gobbledigook" often find themselves steering away from that last gribbly bit at feeding time, putting a paw to their stomach and offering such transparent excuses as "I'm on the Catkins diet at the moment" and "No, seriously, I'm podged - I found a smoky bacon-flavoured crisp on the floor earlier and, as you know, those things are surprisingly filling".

7 comments:

Whimpurr said...

Aren't you just a cutie pie stealing a drink from the faucet! ;o) ~Purrs~

Zippy, Sadie, Speedy and M'Gee said...

Bootsy, you and Zippy have something in common. She will only drink from the tap and really appreciates the water from there at about 2:27 a.m., you know, when there's a chance that mom will walk into the wall while on her way to turn it on. Entertainment and a beverage...

Anonymous said...

& There was me thinking that 'Catgut' was the general term for the ol' scarf 'n' barf / cew 'n' spew routine patented by my dear sadly passed Steve, which involved wolfing down your own dish of tinned tuna at breakneck speed, wolfing down the best part of your mates dish of tuna & then casually sauntering off & projectile vomitting the whole fishy mess up infront of the nearest human for maxium gross out effect. (Urgh, makes me queasy just thinking about it.)

Unknown said...

Love the new dictionary selections.

My Rosie prefers to drink out of a running tap even when I have just put fresh water in her bowl.

Anonymous said...

Grudgin and Litebeer are both beautifully descriptive. I can't get enough of these. Also, Bootsy matches your kitchen tiles perfectly.

martine said...

how about "phantom scratching"?
the act of making a scratching-the-ear movement with the corresponding back leg while being scratched by your owner behind the ear. or is that just something my cats do?

Unknown said...

That's definitely a familiar one, Martine - particularly where The Bear is concerned. I think even if you have managed to scratch the exact place they're trying to get at their feline pride won't let them admit it to you.