Sunday, 28 December 2025

Not a cat (Blackadder)

On the fourth day of Antonym Christmas, the Internet gave to me: a definition starting with D


Blackadder 3.2:  Ink and Incapability

Baldrick's definition of cat: 'not a dog'. 

I particularly like this because my first book has an argument for cat/dog being antonyms (or opposites, depending on your definition of antonym):


For Deese (1965) and many since, antonymy is only indicated if two contrasting items reciprocally trigger each other in word-association tasks. When asked the opposite of peanut butter, American English speakers are likely to say jelly, but when asked the opposite of jelly, they might well say jam. Compare the pair cat/dog, which seems more properly antonymous (in the inclusive sense of the word). While they are each part of a larger contrast set that offers many other potential antonyms, they often co-occur in varying contexts and our conceptual knowledge about their referents allows for a ‘minimal difference’ interpretation under RC-LC. Unlike for gin and tonic, both cat(s) and dog(s) and dog(s) and cat(s) occur regularly in the British National Corpus (forty-two and fifty-six occurrences, respectively). The words also co-occur in a variety of set phrases, as in (3). (3) raining cats and dogs fight like cats and dogs cats and dogs or dogs and cats (= ‘speculative securities’) And they are replaceable in other phrases and compounds: (4) a cat/dog person dog/cat food The juxtaposition of cat/dog in both fixed expressions and creative language use encourages us to view them as a stored canonical pair rather than as a lexicalized conventional phrase. The fact that the two can be deemed ‘minimally different,’ based on what we know about cats and dogs, encourages us to view them as canonical opposites. They are different in that they have incompatible reference, but similar in that they are basic-level terms for four-legged, furry animals that are commonly kept as house pets and that are tame enough and of an appropriate size to remain uncaged and interact with people. These similarities are what makes dog the more usual opposite for cat than mouse (which differs in size, tameness, pet status), even though cat-mouse are experientially reinforced through their own set of expressions (play cat and mouse with; when the cat’s away, the mouse will play).


Murphy ML. 2003. Semantic Relations and the Lexicon: Antonymy, Synonymy and Other Paradigms. Cambridge University Press.


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