Have you ever heard the saying that "cats have nine lives" and wondered where this came from?
My cat-eyed sunglasses made me scour a bit around the internet and this is what I found:
No one knows for sure where the "nine lives" came from, but many historians recognize that this saying has been around for hundreds of years. Ancient Egypt is one place where this can be traced back to. Many of the Gods and Goddesses that the ancient Egyptians worshipped resembled felines or were creatures that were half-cat and half-human. They even mummified their pet cats and placed them in tombs when they died. Cats were held in high regard seen as important animals, and it may have been a belief that they had multiple lives.
Other old texts specifically reference a cat having nine lives. For example, an old English proverb says: "A cat has nine lives. For three he plays, for three he strays, and for the last three he stays." There is also a reference to cats having nine lives in William Shakespeare's play, Romeo and Juliet. Even though we don't know exactly where this stems from, it's clear that cats have played important roles in people's lives and popular culture for a long time.
Obviously, the saying that cats have nine lives is a myth. Cats, like all other animals, have only one life. It's possible that this myth may have persisted due to the fact that cats seem to be able to escape death and accidents easily, coming away unharmed and unshaken. This is because cats have what is called an "air-righting" reflex. This means that while they are in the air, they are able to twist and maneuver their body around helping them land safely on their feet. You've maybe also heard the saying that "cats always land on their feet." While this is not always the case, cats do indeed land on their feet more often than not. This is not to say that they come away from every fall uninjured, but they have a better chance of surviving falls than other animals might.
So there you go - some basical wisdom about the lives of cats! 🐱🐱🐱
Have a cat-riffic Tuesday everyone! 😄💜
In Italy cats have seven lives not nine, maybe here the life is more difficult (for a cat) 🤣🤣🤣
😂😂😂
Red is my favorite and it looks great
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Yay! What a cat-tacular post! 😻 Full of feline joy, from head to toe 😜❤️
Indeed! 😄😄
Thanks for giving us background information about the expression. It's always good to learn new things about what we think we know or know we don't know. :)
In its earliest days, YouTube was known as a place for uploading cat videos which kept people glued to the screen. Most of us thought it was just an Internet or WWW thing, but it was that way as well in the earliest days of motion pictures before Hollywood came into existence. Imagine watching cat movies from 1907 or even 1896!
It also partly explains the popularity of Catwoman as a Batman character going back to the earliest days of the comics in the 1940s.
indeed! I have already read that about the very early Youtube days and the cat videos, very interesting!