LEND ME YOUR EAR: GENUS CAT GIVES THE FINAL WORD TO CLEAR UP PEOPLE-TALK

First, let me apologize to readers for having permitted a cat to cloud my vision. The last thing I ever wanted was to fall in love with a cat. At the same time, I feel duty-bound to apologize to the beautiful cat across the way. I should have invited him to lend me his ear months ago. His regal mien was proof positive that he was of royal lineage.

According to cat fanciers and their detractors, it's the genus Cat that rules the world. VIPs from every walk of life maintain that the world is divided into two kinds of people -- those who adore cats and those who despise them. Many lovers and haters of cats keep them to remind themselves of who they are. In the view of those who keep them, cats are the only animals that can make humankind feel inferior.

In previous columns, I've said this was the cause of the divide between Peg Bracken's outlook and mine. But within the past few months, I've learned that cats have a princely lot to teach us humans. Peg didn't have to learn this. Her book "On Being Old for the First Time" showed that she was born knowing.

But cats can be as contrary as they are loving, and we humans can be just as perverse. We misuse words, then try to achieve balance through the words we use.

Today we return to our lifelong love affair with the English language. This by no means cancels our love affair with the black-and-white beauty across the way. In fact, these two love affairs go hand in paw. What we must all do is bear in mind that the most important word in the English language is the word "word." As we are told in the Gospel of St. John, "In the beginning was the Word."

"Every word was once a poem," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Richard Lederer, in his book "The Miracle of Language," lists these among the following choices having to do with the difficulties involved in using words to balance the world about us:

"A new word is like an animal you have caught. You must learn its ways and break it before you can us it." -- H.G. Wells

"A very great part of the mischief in the world arises from words." -- Edmund Burke

"Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind." -- Rudyard Kipling

"Language, as well as the faculty of speech, was the immediate gift of God." -- Noah Webster

"If all my possessions were to be taken from me with one exception, I would choose to keep the power of communication, for by it I would regain all the others." -- Daniel Webster

"Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination." -- Ludwig Wittgenstein

"Except ye utter by the tongue words easy to understand, how shall it be known what is spoken? -- I Corinthians, The Bible

Among the most poetic from this list is James Kilpatrick's pithy contribution:

"We see words that blow like leaves in the winds of autumn -- golden words, bronze words, words that catch the light like opals. We learn that words have an independent life of their own, grown out of echoes and connections and associations. We see that words are tactile, we find rough words, smooth words, words that caress, words that strike."

Readers would have to be tone-deaf not to hear the music above the noise in these well-chosen words. A fleeting thought of using them for a column on the multiple meanings inherent proved to be just that -- fleeting. Such a column would stretch from here to Eternity and take me with it.

Kilpatrick, like so many of his alleged peers, has mixed feelings about the worth of cats -- though cats have always allowed the big human to share their living quarters. And the prolonged death of his wife, sculptress Marie Pietri, who adored cats, grieved him into getting closer to her cherished pets, even as she held them closer and closer while death closed in on her.

As indicated earlier in this attempt to show balance through words, cats and their perverse ways of "helping" balance the score appear throughout the Bible. Gentle readers, search the Scriptures and ye shall not be misinformed -- whatever your relationship with the genus Cat.

To help explain the differences between people-language and the language Tibby intuits, Tibby the Wonder-Cat's people-mom Barbi reads to him from her vast collection of books. She tells him her biggest book is called The Bible and that the Bible is full of cats. But poor Tibby finds the Book too heavy even to open, so up to now he has not been able to find the cats.

Meantime, however, Barbi has shown him something the little old lady across the way wrote about him, and Tibby was so excited he chewed the column up trying to find himself.

Aileen Lorberg is a language columnist for the Southeast Missourian.