The Cat Can Look at the Queen

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hey, Grant. This is Nancy Dennis calling from Panama City Beach, Florida.

Hi, Nancy. Welcome to the show. It’s so nice to talk to you.

Hey, Nancy. Thanks. I have an old saying that my mother always said to me. She would be looking at me and, of course, I would get antsy thinking, what have I done wrong? And I’d say, Mama, why are you looking at me? And she said, well, can’t the cat look at the queen? And I wondered, does that have some history or is that something she might have made up?

Oh my goodness. Does it have some history? So let me recap here. So your mama’s looking at you and you ask her why and she says, yeah, can’t the cat look at the queen?

Yeah. Okay. But Nancy, would you believe this goes back at least to the mid 16th century?

Whoa. Yeah. Long history. Yeah. It’s really, really old. And the sense of it is the same idea that you’re talking about, that somebody can look at royalty regardless of their own status or position.

Oh my goodness. Yeah. It appears in a book of Proverbs from 1562 in the form, what, a cat may look on a king, you know? There are different versions of it throughout the time after that, like a cat is free to contemplate a monarch.

Did you see the movie Victoria and Abdul a year or two ago? It was about Queen Victoria and this man is brought to her from India to work for her and he’s given all these instructions about how you’re supposed to treat the queen. You’re supposed to not look at her in the eyes and when you leave the room where the queen is, you’re supposed to back out of it so that you’re being very, very deferential.

And the idea with this saying is that cats don’t have to do that. They’re so out of the class system that the rules don’t apply to them.

Oh, no rules apply to cats.

No rules apply to cats.

It sounds like you have firsthand experience of that.

No, but I just don’t like to be around them.

And then there’s some transference there, the idea that some of us are so outside of somebody else’s system of respect that we are just observers and not really participants.

Well, thank you for enlightening me.

Well, thank you for sharing this family story. We really appreciate it.

We’re really nice to talk to you. Take care now.

You too. Enjoy it, and I love the show.

Thanks so much.

Call us again sometime, okay, Nancy?

Okay, thanks.

All right, bye-bye.