The Etymology of "Copycat"
It's about the copy, not the cat
We’ve all heard the saying “Monkey see, Monkey do.”
While I should have been able to at least guess what “copycat” meant, I was biased by the source of my curiosity.
I adopted my cat Mulah just a few days before the pandemic shut everything down, and regardless of how mentally unstable I may be now, it’s nothing compared to what I would have become without Mulah.
She was a shy kitten for a long time, but eventually became friendly with me, then bonded with me. When I was about to go crazy nine hours into another 12 hour shift, she seemed to sense this and suddenly appeared on my lap.
At my workstation, I use my right hand to use the mouse, and after a while, she started putting her right paw on the table, just like me.
As the months stretched into years, she started going to the bathroom at the same time as I did.
She waits for me to start eating before eating her food, except for on days I forget to eat and go straight to beer.
She used to crawl into my underwear and curl up while I was taking a dump.
She tried again recently, but now she’s too big.
In any case, I started to wonder if “copycat” had similar origins to “monkey see, monkey do.”
I’ve had a few cats in the past, but the first was mainly my dad’s, the second and third were mainly my girlfriends’ (it’s difficult to imagine I had two serious girlfriends), and the fourth was half-feral. All of them were outdoor cats, and the fourth, Valu, lived in Tonga (I doubt she’s still alive, but she was a tough little critter). Valu had been passed down to me from the previous Peace Corps Volunteer at my site when she was just over six months old.
He told me that after a year and a half of living with rats, geckos, molokau (giant centipedes) and other vermin, the last six months with Valu had been heaven. Even when she was still very small, her odor started to scare off the rats, and once she could run, she cleaned house.
Molokau have a hard exoskeleton and can grow over three feet long. Their bite hurts like hell and affects people differently. For me, my bitten foot swelled to twice its size, but after a couple of days, I was pretty much fine. Other people got fevers and were bedridden for weeks.
I was bitten at a hostel on the way back to the main island for a stupid Peace Corps meeting.
One molokau got into my house while Valu was off hunting in the woods and I had to hit it seven or eight times with a frying pan as hard as I could to kill it.
One snuck in while she was there, and she knew exactly where to bite the fucker and killed it in seconds.
In short, she was a necessity. There were only about 70 of us on that island, but most of the families told me she had rid their homes of rats, too, and while Tongans typically aren’t as friendly towards dogs and cats as we are, they respected cats for keeping rodents and other pests under control. They still occasionally tried to kill them because every cat on that island was a thief. When I turned my back on whatever I was eating, Valu would grab it and scarf it down immediately.
But cats were still more valued than the roving packs of wild dogs, which many Tongans regularly ate. I had to fight off a pack of dogs once. Usually, pretending to pick up a rock was enough to make them scatter, but not this time. Thankfully, there was a broken branch nearby, so I picked it up and started swatting at them, but one dog got so close I had to punch it in the face. Even in the middle of this anarchy, I thought to myself “Jesus Christ, if I did this in the US they’d throw me in jail.”
In any case, the point is that Mulah is my first indoor cat, and not by choice. We live on the fourth floor and I let her out on the terrace, but other than that, there’s not much I can do for her, and if you’re about to recommend a leash, have you ever tried putting a leash on a cat? Even if you start when they’re kittens, it’s a two person job, and even though Mulah is a relatively small cat, the amount of damage she can do when she gets the zoomies is impressive.
So no, a leash is not a viable option, and even if you somehow manage to leash a cat, if they want to get it off, they will.
Maybe all cats imitate people, but I had just never seen it because all of my previous cats spent most of their time either sleeping or outdoors.
Like all cats, Mulah sleeps about 16 hours a day, but when I go to bed, she wakes up and joins me.
My last few corporate jobs involved proofreading, editing, and writing copy. I’m writing what’s called “copy” right now. Anything in print is considered to be copy, and copycat basically means the same thing as being a plagiarist.
While we keep cats as pets today, during medieval times the term “cat” was used as a term of contempt for another person. The origin of the idiom “copycat” comes from 19th century Maine, when Constance Cary Harrison wrote in her 1887 memoir Bar Harbor that “Our boys say you are a copy cat, if you write in anything that’s been already printed.”
The word branched out to include people who imitated others, but sadly, has almost nothing to do with cats.
Regardless, if your cat imitates you, please let me know in the comments. Maybe my cat is a freak, which is fine, but I’d bet there are others out there.
