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My wife’s mother used to tell her that her hair "looked like a cat sucked on it." This struck me as an odd thing to say and it prompted me to ask some questions.
Where did this phrase come from? Was there just one specific hair-sucking incident from which this expression arose or was there a period in time when cats went around sucking on people’s hair? Did other people witness these occurrences? If so, what did they say? Did they say, "Excuse me, but there’s a cat on your head, and I think, if I’m not mistaken, that it’s sucking on your hair"? Or did they just say, "Well, there’s something you don’t see everyday"? Was the person whose hair was being sucked on aware of it? Or did they respond to the news that their hair was being sucked on by saying, "Oh really?" only to feel around the top of their head and find a cat there? I would think an event like this would require several witnesses in order for it to become a saying that was passed down from generation to generation. Perhaps the expression arose from a time when animals behaved in ways that would be considered unacceptable in modern times. Maybe there was an age when hair-sucking cats were not uncommon. It could be that because it happened it olden times that there was even a Latin word for it like "Catuslickushair." Are there similar expressions out there that I am unaware of such as "Your clothes look like they were worn by a llama" or "Your face looks like a possum had it for a snack"? Another question that occurred to me was how can you tell, just by looking at it, that it was a cat that was doing the hair-sucking? Does hair that was sucked on by a cat have a different quality, a different sheen, than hair that was sucked on by, shall we say, a dolphin? And where, I ask you, is Richard Lederer when you really need him? As you can see, the phrase got me to thinking and I will continue to ponder it. Sadly, I don’t have the answers to any of these questions now because, like they say, my brain feels like it was stolen by a rhesus monkey. |
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