an miau plaintively and wheedlingly in asking favors, and this if it has to be too long repeated may rise to an angry and despairing yowl like the angry cry of the baby. It has a remarkable register of shrieks in its combat with its fellows although often silent when battling with dogs. It has also a crooning note inviting its young to its dugs. Very unique is its hiss and spitting, which is highly developed in some of its wild congeners and which some think it copied in order to add an ophidian terror to those which its own powers could create. These seven types of phonic expression for as many different sentiments are all in the highest degree expressive, not only to its own species but to man. There is much reason to think that all infants have to learn not to fear even the most specific of these utterances, while some soon come to be very effective danger signals. Altogether this vocabulary shows the cat’s nature to be emotionally rich and diversified although it is almost proverbially changeable and unreliable. Animal vocalization expresses feeling, not intellect, and the child lives so largely in the world of the former that its rapport to the feline soul is made much closer by this quality, so that it anthropomorphizes the cat and learns far more of the animal soul from it than from the more humanized and less composite psyche of the dog, for the cat has rightly been called the most emotional as well as the most vocally accomplished of mammals.
Besides these more readily rubricized elements of children’s ailurophobias, our records show many other special features. One lady feared “nothing so much as the silent to and fro movement at the end of a cat’s tail,” which she fancied might even bite her and always watched for and dreaded it. This, too, Cornish would say had a viperous suggestion.
1. From Greek ἀίλουρος via scientific Latin Aeluroidea, the adjective aeluroid means: of, relating to, designating, or characteristic of, the division or superfamily Aeluroidea of the mammalian order Carnivora, comprising the cat family Felidae and allied families.
2. In English, the combining form uro-, from Greek οὐρά, means: relating to a tail or the caudal region; it occurs in such terms as uropod, denoting the sixth and last pair of abdominal appendages of lobsters and related crustaceans, forming part of the tail fan.
further reading on cats:
the authentic origin of ‘to rain cats and dogs’
fat cat (wealthy and powerful person)
no room to swing a cat
to look like something the cat has brought in
the nonsensical origin of ‘Kilkenny cats’
to let the cat out of the bag
the Cat-and-Mouse Act
a cat may look at a king
to see which way the cat jumps
‘who’s she’—the cat’s mother?
like a cat on hot bricks
not a cat in hell’s chance
to grin like a Cheshire cat
‘the cat’s whiskers’, and all that jazz