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Fighting like (the) Kilkenny cats

Posted by Bob on May 26, 2009 at 21:39

In Reply to: Fighting like (the) Kilkenny cats posted by David FG on April 08, 2009 at 19:39:

: : : Often the most colorful use of language is by people fairly advanced in years. For me, this lends a sense of urgency to finding out where some of that usage came from. The fear, I suppose, is that something valuable will be irretrievably lost if phraseology is allowed to die off with its users. Conversely, some expressions become utterly senseless once their currency is depleted. That said; Where did the expression "Fighting like (the) Kilkenny cats." come from? Other than geographically-speaking, that is.

: : One of my very few British references says the expression came from "an old Irish legend about two cats who fought each other so long and so murderously that finally there was nothing left but their tails." "British English from A to Zed" by Norman Schur (FirstHarperPerennial edition, 1991). Page 199.

: It seems there are three main theories on the origin of the phrase. The first is that was the result of the stationing of a group of German (Hessian) mercenary soldiers in Kilkenny. To relieve the boredom in barracks, soldiers would tie two cats together by their tails, hang them over a washing line and leave them to fight. One day an officer came to investigate the noise. In great haste, a soldier cut off the cats' tails to let them escape, but wasn't able to hide the evidence left behind. The officer was told that the cats had been fighting each other so savagely it had proved impossible to separate them and that they had fought so desperately that they had devoured each other, with the exception of their tails.

: A second story refers to a legendary battle on a plain near Kilkenny, supposedly sometime in the eighteenth century, between a thousand cats of that city and a thousand cats that had gathered from all other parts of the island. This may be a parable based on dissents of the period between the people of the Kilkenny area and other parts of Ireland.

: The third theory is that it may indeed be a kind of parable, but one based in factional disputes in Kilkenny between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. The town then was divided into two townships called Irishtown and Englishtown. For religious, cultural and political reasons there were deep divisions between the two groups. These were made worse because the rights and duties of the two townships hadn't been made clear by statute. This led to three centuries of dispute between the rival municipal bodies that ended in beggaring both of them.

: (This is adapted from Michael Quinion in 'World Wide Words'.)

: DFG

One should post the famous poem for the sake of completeness:

There once were two cats of Kilkenny
Each thought there was one cat too many
So they fought and they hit
And they scratched and they bit
'Til (excepting their nails
And the tips of their tails)
Instead of two cats there weren't any!

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