786-1: Feedback, Notes and Comments

No room to swing a cat The last issue two weeks ago discussed this idiom. Tony Chabot commented, “I had heard that it was originally ‘not enough room to swing a cot’ a ship-board bed”. The suggestion isn’t new — it appeared in the Calcutta Review in 1889: “Few cabins were spacious enough to allow of a cot swinging freely lengthwise (query, is not this the origin of the phrase ‘room to swing a cat in’?)”. Another suggested origin was mentioned by Derek Silk, that a cat was a type of small boat and “if a harbour was too congested for a ship to enter it was said that there was no room to swing a cat.” However, I can find no evidence for either origin and the early examples don’t support them.

More on the verge Following our discussions about the many names Americans and others have for the strip of green that separates pedestrians from drivers, Pauline Bryant wrote from Australia. In the late 1980s and early 1990s she mapped the dialect regions of Australian English for her PhD thesis. “In Australia, it depends whereabouts you live. In Western Australia it is verge. In the south-east of Australia, it is indeed nature strip [as others have previously mentioned]. But in the rest of South Australia and NSW and in Queensland it’s footpath. It doesn’t matter whether it has a concrete strip along it or not, it is still the footpath. To the confusion of the rest of Australia, in most of NSW and in Queensland, you can have a footpath with a footpath on it, or a footpath without a footpath on it.”

Lsoft Choice Awards It looks as though we shall come top in the May contest as well as the April one. We can’t, of course, be finalists twice, so it would seem to be time to relax our voting efforts to let others achieve top ranking during the remaining months. Thanks to everyone for your efforts. We must wait until late in the year to learn which of the six monthly finalists gains prizes.