Fur flies as Tories get caught in cat-flap – but is it a catastrophe?
This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 5th, 2011 at 4:37 PM
If you don’t like puns, or cats for that matter, step away from this blog post now. Home Secretary, Theresa May’s blunder at the Tory party conference yesterday unleashed a flurry of cat related comments from the media who have been in pun heaven.
‘Clarke mocks May as catfight over human rights dogs the Tories,’ taunts today’s Guardian on page eight. While the headline on page 10 of the Independent states, ‘Fur flies between Clarke and May as cat tale starts immigration row’. And last night’s BBC news programmes purr-sued the story with similar glee (sorry, couldn’t resist).
Can’t you just imagine the Cheshire Cat sized grins on journalists’ faces as they opened their laptops after May’s speech?
She couldn’t have given them a better pet to play with. There are lots of purrfect cat-related terms to use in ameowsing headlines for this sorry tale. And so many of our words are prefixed with cat. I must confess I’ve sometimes played a little game to find how many words I can come up with that start with cat - sad but true. Here are some of the more obvious ones:
Catacombs
Catastrophe
Cataclysmic
Catatonic
Catapult
Caterpillar
Caterwaul
Category
Catalyst
Catalogue
Catabolic
And that’s just a few of the ones in which the prefix is pronounced ‘cat’ (well, ‘cata’ actually). But where does the prefix come from?
According to The Oxford Dictionaries website, its origin is Greek and it can mean:
- down ; downwards: catadromous
- wrongly; badly: catachresis
- completely: cataclysm
- against; alongside: catapult
In case you’re interested, or need some tips for your next game of Scrabble, here’s an extensive list from Scrabble Finder
I suppose I should thank the Home Secretary for inspiring this post. If only she hadn’t looked like the cat who’d got the cream when she delivered that now infamous line, ‘and I’m not making this up’ …
I most certainly wouldn’t want to be in her speech writer’s shoes today!
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