A New Hampshire listener recalls that as a boy, when he talked friends within earshot of his mother and said referred to her as she, his mother would pipe up with “she, being the cat’s mother.” It’s an old expression suggesting that it’s insulting to refer to people in the third person if they’re present. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “She, the Cat’s Mother”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, this is John. I’m in New Hampshire.
Hey, John, welcome.
What’s up? How can we help?
Let’s say I have an odd phrase that my mother used, and I think she got from her mother.
And it has to do with when you’re sitting in a room, let’s say when we were kids,
We would be sitting around and we might say, while mom is there, we might say,
Oh, she’s going to get us in trouble.
She would say she being the cat’s mother, meaning that don’t call me she, call me by my name.
It’s kind of an admonishment.
And I’m not really sure where she being or she is the cat’s mother comes from.
It’s an odd, really kind of an odd expression.
It sure is.
Did you Google around and look into it?
I did a little bit, and I found that it kind of originated maybe 150 years ago or something.
But it didn’t really give me much information on what the background of it was or where it came from.
There’s a couple of things here linguistically that we can talk about.
Let’s get rid of the one, unfortunately, that we can’t help you with much.
We don’t know why it’s the cat’s mother.
We don’t know.
But we do, like you said, find it back at least 100, maybe, I don’t know, about 150 years, but quite a ways back.
Some sources suggest, some authoritative reference work suggests, that the cat’s mother is an anonymous creature.
You know the cat has a mother, but you don’t know her name, and that’s why she’s chosen.
And we’re thinking about when cats weren’t these cuddled indoor creatures, but they were basically wild all over the place and kind of half feral, half domestic, that sort of thing.
Okay.
So I’m sorry we don’t know the origin of that.
But the other thing that’s interesting here is that injunction against using a pronoun for a person who is present is very widespread and is widely considered rude.
And yet, and yet, there are so many people who’ve never heard of it that they are shocked to find that calling somebody she when she’s in the room, particularly a woman, is insulting.
They’re really just, it never occurred to them that somebody might be offended by that.
My mother had that. My mother hated it.
It might be more with a woman than a man?
Yeah, it’s almost, at least in the English-speaking world, it’s almost always a woman.
And this probably dates back to more prim notions of showing deference and respect to women as these sensitive creatures who need coddling because they’re made out of fine china.
Of course. Right.
But these days, my mother would get upset if she heard us talking about her, even when she wasn’t present, as she said that we have to do wax or she doesn’t want us to do Y.
Yeah, she would just, I have a name, she’d say.
She never used the cat’s name, but I have a name.
Use my name.
Yeah, I got that one, too.
But she would always refer to this particular phrase.
But she didn’t know where it came from, either.
She just used it.
But I do know, I do know.
There are plenty of people that to refer to somebody as she when she’s present
Or when you could have otherwise easily used their name is considered rude.
Okay.
John, thanks so much for calling.
Okay, well, thank you.
Take care.
Bye.
Have a great day.
Yep, bye.
Bye-bye.
