Best wishes for the coming New Year!
Jaroslaw Lipski To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
Although this subject was discussed couple of month ago, quite
unexpectedly I found an interesting information in a book on cats which
casts some new light on this term. In "Cat watching" Desmond Morris asks
why sheep gut should be perversely referred to as catgut, and suggests
that the clue lies in the earliest use of the term. At the beginning of
the seventeenth century, one author wrote of fiddlers "tickling the
dryed gutts of a mewing cat". Later we hear of a man upset "at every
twang of the cat-gut, as if he heard at the moment the wailing of the
helpless animal that had been sacrificed to harmony". These references
come from a period when domestic cats were all too often the victims of
persecution and torture, and the sound of squealing cats was not
unfamiliar to human ears. In addition, there was the noise of the
caterwauling at times when feral tomcats were arguing over females in
heat. Together, these characteristic feline sounds provided the obvious
basis for a comparison with the din created by inexpert musicians
scraping at their stringed instruments. In the imaginations of the
tormented listeners, the inappropriate sheep gut became transformed into
the appropriate catgut - a vivid fiction to replace a dull fact (as he
suggests).
Hmm.......quite interesting...though he didn't enclose any bibliography
(pity!).
