spade cat (was Re: "like" and "as if")

[Jonathan Lighter]

"Spade" is the spelling I see most frequently on those "Free Cat" notices on the vet's bulletin board.

JL

Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: spade cat (was Re: "like" and "as if")
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

At 12:38 AM -0400 6/24/05, Wilson Gray wrote:
>On Jun 23, 2005, at 9:31 PM, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>>Mid-sentential examples from _Mojo Navigator_:
>>
>>-----
>>At ten o'clock they started to serve drinks and the older crowd would
>>come
>>in, and like they=92re white-collar drunks and all...a bad scene.
>>("Big Brother & the Holding Company", Sep. 1966)
>>-----
>>The only other blues clubs are in the South Side, and like you just
>>don't
>>go down there unless you have a spade
>
>FWIW, Richie Havens is the only spade that I've ever heard use the word
>"spade" to mean "spade": "I bet you didn't know that there were spade
>cowboys, did you?" A rhetorical question asked on a TV show as he was
>about to sing some Western ditty.
>
>Then there was the time that I asked a friend at UC Davis please not to
>refer to spades as "spades," especially when she was talking to a
>spade, at least. She replied that, at her no-doubt lily-white high
>school in her no-doubt lily-white town somewhere in the
>Northern-California wine country, it was customary to refer to spades
>as "spades." After pondering this for over 35 years, I still haven't
>been able to winkle out the logical connection between my request and
>her reply to it. Clearly, talking to her was like talking to a wall, to
>coin a phrase. She just didn't get it.
>
>-Wilson Gray

Which brings me to one of my favorite orthographic eggcorns,
preserved from October 1995 when we were in the kitty-cat market.
This classified ad appeared in our local throw-away weekly:

SR. CITIZEN KITTY needs loving home, spade, all shots, healthy.
I've been a good kitty & promise to be a purr-fect pet. Please
call ____. Love Kitty.

There are 130 google hits for "spade cat", and while some have the
hipster meaning in mind--

A spade cat from Port Washington joined the Quarry and tried to tell
us what was on his mind. He was a fairly good singer...

If Barton had been a spade cat they would have thrown his ass into
jail before you could say Bull Conners.

--many clearly involve the eggcornish reading:

Like the difference between the behavior of a spade cat and an unspade cat.

I still cant quite beleive that a portrayal of a recently spade cat
could be such great comedy material

My female spade cat has a problem peeing on my bath rugs.

(Actually, after coping recently with a (male) cat who had *no*
problem peeing on my bath rugs, I wouldn't complain about a cat
having a problem doing so.)

Larry

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