The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Friday, May 13, 2005

Felosophical Speculations on a Puzzling Human Utterance

It has long been known among felosophers that human beings can communicate amongst themselves, largely by means of subconscious physical signals and crude vocalisations. In addition, the domestic school of felosophy has established that human beings frequently attempt to communicate with cats by these same primitive means.

This discovery came as a considerable blow to many of the more optimistic domestic felosophers, who believed that, given the proper circumstances, human beings might some day be trained in eyeball-to-eyeball telepathic contact. Many cats do still try to send messages to human beings in this way; but most felosophers are convinced that human eyeballs are simply not built to receive the necessary wavelengths.

Despite this setback for interspecies communication, felosophers have continued to study human vocalisations in the hope of uncovering whatever meaning they may have. One of the most controversial is of course that interesting double grunt, Bad cat. This vocalisation has been studied for decades by many of the most highly respected felosophers, some of whom have grown so disgusted at its intractability as to declare that it has no real meaning at all; rather like such strange and apparently redundant noises as No and Giddoffathat.

Nevertheless, prolonged and thorough study by generations of heroic felosophers has produced some positive results. It is now fairly clear, for example, that the Bad cat vocalisation generally occurs within a short period of, or even simultaneously with, certain other mysterious human activities such as pushing cats away from interesting breakables or removing cats' claws from interestingly textured clothing and/or flesh. It seems clear that there is a relationship between the vocalisation and these other seemingly irrational human instincts.

The nature of this relationship is controversial. Some felosophers believe that the Bad cat vocalisation is simply a freakish quirk of evolution, like bipedalism or the enigmatic disinclination on the part of many human beings to bite the heads off live rodents. Others have put forth the daring hypothesis that the human beings may be trying, in some primitive and largely unconscious fashion, to communicate with the cats at which the vocalisation is directed.

When considered in context, this idea is perhaps not as ridiculous as it sounds. It must be remembered that the impossibility of feline-human communication has never been proved, and that very few felosophers now accept the old theory that human beings evolved the tin-opener, the laundry basket and the airing cupboard out of their own unassisted consciousness. Although no definite proof yet exists, it seems reasonable to postulate that constant and dedicated feline eyeball telepathy may be having some effect on certain highly sensitised human cortexes. The influence is doubtless extremely limited, and probably badly distorted owing to the peculiar shape of the human pupil; but nevertheless, the presence of such an influence would explain a good deal, possibly including a sudden urge on the part of human beings to communicate with their feline friends.

What, then, are the human beings trying to say? It is far too early to do more than speculate, but the typical context of the Bad cat vocalisation has led some felosophers to a paradoxically optimistic conclusion. They believe that, thanks to years of patient eyeballing, the human beings have gained some rudimentary sense of decorum and are trying to warn cats about the anti-social urges to which they are about to succumb. This is why the Bad cat vocalisation always occurs around the same time as a human faux pas such as lifting a cat off the dinner table. Although the human being cannot control the urge to indulge its primitive, table-protecting instincts, it somehow manages to vocalise a signal of warning or apology for its irrational action. Sometimes the warning is delivered too late, e.g. after the cat has been lifted away; but it would be churlish to blame human beings for the undeveloped state of their cerebral cortexes.

More and more felosophers are now subjecting the Bad cat vocalisation to in-depth study and acclaiming it as one of the most significant progressions in feline-human relations since the demise of ancient Egypt and that society's healthy perspective on the place of cats in the evolutionary scale. It may be too much to hope that human beings will soon acquire anything like genuine good manners; but when one thinks of what has been achieved within a few short millennia, there are certainly grounds for optimism.

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