Let me get this out of the way right now: I can't stand cats. Even if I were not allergic to them, to the point of burning sensations in the chest, sneezing fits, and eyes so itchy I can't see, I would still not like them. Haughty, aloof, and about as much fun as a convention of abstemious, serially monogamous, and devoutly heterosexual shoe salesmen, cats seem to me to be the polar opposite of what anyone would want in a pet. A couple weeks ago I was ringing up a lady in the store who was buying a cat calendar. Bored, I said what I usually say to someone buying anything cat related: "I'm sorry, I'm allergic to cats, I can't ring you up." Wait two beats. "No, I'm just kidding." The woman took no pity on my feline-induced respiratorial and visual plights and just sighed, "Oh, a life without cats." Her tone was sad, bordering on the horrified, while I muttered underneath my breath, "If only."
That said, due to circumstances beyond my control, I have lived with a cat named Boo for five years. I like Boo. He does amuse me from time to time, and I have spotted glimpses of a personality from time to time. Which doesn't change my mind at all on cats, but only serves to deepen my understanding of something a southern professor told me twenty years ago about racial relations. He told the story of a white woman who worked in day care and was loved by all the kids and parents, who were predominately black. Eventually she was convicted of plotting to bomb a black church. The professor talked about people loving the individual but hating the race, or vice versa, hating the individual but loving the race; although the concepts sound absurd, they make a lot of sense in understanding some people's views on race. It also sums up my view on cats. I like (I can't go so far as to say love) Boo, but I still hate the race of cats.
Anyway, over the last few days, as happens, the phrase "there is more than one way to skin a cat" has popped up a couple times in my life. The phrase, which obviously means there are many ways to accomplish a given task, intrigues me not because I'm some allergy-afflicted nutcase who wants to skin every cat alive (though don't think I haven't thought about what such a post might do to my hit rate if the PETA people found out about it). Sadly, like most phrases that interest me, there doesn't seem to be a lot known about where or why the phrase originated. But what intrigues me so much about the phrase is that there ever was a time and a place where skinning cats was so prevalent that multiple ways of doing it were invented and became so popular that the act of skinning a cat, in multiple ways, could become a metaphoric phrase that exists to this day. I'm not big on venison, and for all I know there is only one way to skin a deer, but I could "get" the phrase "there is more than one way to skin a deer" a lot more easily than the cat version.
I just read a statistic that says 70% of the world's population is not allowed to freely practice their religion. Horrible stat, and while it seems a little too high to me, I realize that from my provincial, thank God I'm an American perspective, I just might not know how un-free the rest of the world is. But I would wager, even with my limited, very privileged American middle class upbringing, that no more than 1% of the world's population (and certainly that part of the population whose language includes the skin the cat phrase) has ever had the occasion to skin a cat, witness the skinning of a cat, or even benefit from the skinning of a cat-- whichever of the I guess myriad ways there are to skin a cat. So why, why does this phrase still exist? If there truly is more than one way to skin a cat, you'd think there would be more than one folksy phrase to express the fact that there is more than one way to do something. This language never ceases to float my boat, fill my Twinkie, and shake my martini.
Husker Du-How To Skin A Cat
