"You can't make that cat walk backwards."

[Jonathan Lighter]

Yeah, but you can't swim that shark backward.

JL

On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 12:47 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "You can't make that cat walk backwards."
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 11:11 AM, Dave Wilton <dave at wilton.net> wrote:
> > "Walking back the cat"
>
> Does this mean, "causing the cat to walk backward"? IME, as a
> cat-person for over seventy years, cats walk backward whenever they
> feel like it and motivating a cat to do it is trivial. All that's
> necessary is a situation on which you don't want the cat to walk
> backward.
>
> --
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
> to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
>
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