[Ads-l] the slow, or fast, demise of the cat-house

[Rich Lowenthal]

There is also the similar term "cat flat." Even more obsolete than "cat 
house" though.


------ Original Message ------
>From "ADSGarson O'Toole" 
<00001aa1be50b751-dmarc-request at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
To ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Date 7/27/2026 5:26:55 PM
Subject Re: the slow, or fast, demise of the cat-house

>Interesting topic. Here is a start. Green's Dictionary of Slang (GDoS)
>has an excellent entry for the noun cat-house. Here are the first and
>last citations.
>
>https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/moa5iyi
>
>[Begin excerpt from GDoS]
>cat-house n.
>1. (US) a brothel.
>
>1850 [US] Life in Boston & N.Y. (Boston, MA) 10 Aug. n.p.: The biggest
>kind of cat house, including girls, pimp, French spring bed-steads,
>three-dollar per bottle chapmagne (cider) and all the other fixin’s.
>...
>2020 [Aus] D. Whish-Wilson Shore Leave 29: ‘Every cathouse in every
>port, you’ll find sliced pockets in the mattresses’.
>[End excerpt from GDoS]
>
>Google Books Ngram Viewer is a flawed but interesting tool for tracing
>the popularity of words and phrases over time which you may already
>know about.
>
>https://books.google.com/ngrams/
>
>The following graphs do not distinguish between the different senses
>of "cat house".
>
>The OED has three senses for cat-house:
>
>(a) a movable pent-house used in early times by besiegers to protect
>themselves in approaching fortifications
>(b) a house for cats
>(c) a bothel
>
>Here is a pointer to the graph for "cat house"
>
>https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22cat+house%22&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3
>
>Here is a pointer to the graph for "cathouse"
>
>https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cathouse&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3
>
>Garson
>
>On Mon, Jul 27, 2026 at 4:52 PM Martin Schneider
><000024dc089a88e9-dmarc-request at listserv.uga.edu> wrote:
>>
>>  Dialect enthusiasts!
>>
>>  Fifteen or so years ago, I embarked on a project that involved tracking,
>>  and watching, the #1 movies, in sequence, starting from 1970. The movie had
>>  to be the listed box office winner in a given week, and the weeks supplied
>>  the chronology. As I watched these movies, I noticed this term that is no
>>  longer in use. It came up in multiple movies. "Cat house," to mean,
>>  bordello, brothel, a place where women of ill repute are available, that
>>  sort of thing.
>>
>>  "What'ya think you're doing, this isn't a cat house!" Such lines were
>>  littered across the 1970 set of movies.
>>
>>  Obviously, the term stood out for not really existing in our time. What
>>  happened to it? Where did it come from? When did it die? These are things
>>  we could track.
>>
>>  Thanks,
>>  Martin
>>
>>  ------------------------------------------------------------
>>  The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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