#330 Kitty Korner

Wisdom means pondering and coming to a measured conclusion. But wisdom is ill treated in this country. You can be wise as an owl but usually you’re wise like a donkey, as in wise ass. Sometimes for no apparent reason, you’re wise like a piece of ground, as in wise acre. So I was pondering the other day. Someone was giving directions to a place and they said it was kitty korner from another place. I’ve heard it both ways—kitty korner and catty corner. I always liked kitty corner better. We say “here kitty kitty,” not “here catty catty.” Catty Corner sounds funny, less like a direction than an attitude. One hardly ever says catty for anything other than remarks that one snippy person, usually female, makes about another. “Oh, she was so catty... and did you see those pedal pushers, they were so last year.” More importantly, how did the word evolve to indicate a direction? I think we can all agree that kitty korner means diagonal. When point A is kitty korner from point B, if we were to plot it on a flat plane we would see that point A forms a diagonal line with point B. If the line were to bisect an imaginary square then one could assume that two of the opposing right angles in that square would be bisected as well, forming two equal triangles and two 45 degree angles in each corner. Does kitty korner refer to the angle a cat takes when he gets a hair up his tail and decides to head in another direction? Or does it refer to a cat’s tendency to cut corners period. To dash across an open space like a jaywalker rather than patiently wait at an intersection, and cross with first one light and then the other? Why don’t we call jaywalkers catwalkers then? Why did we bring a blue jay into the whole mess? Other animal similes; stomping like an elephant, as slow as a turtle, squashed like a bug, like a bull in a china shop, all convey some instantly recognizable trait that we associate with that animal. Kitty korner sounds like the place where you’d find a cathouse. The problem is there’s no middle ground. Usually meanings have some flexibility in the words you use to convey them. In this case you’re either stuck sound overly nerdly and mathematical—Yes Bob’s Door Knobs is on the corner of Fifth and Main, diagonal from Jerry’s Laundry and Espresso—or annoyingly cutesy—Yes Bob’s Candle Shop is kitty korner from Jerry’s Décor and Scrap. I feel uncomfortable using either. I hate like heck to say something is “kitty korner” from something else. “Diagonal” never seems to pop out of my non-math mind and “across from” can mean anything. So I’m left with doing hand gestures, genuflecting in the air like an autistic parson. Or a headsetted cellphoner on the opposite street corner. So now that we got kitty korner figured out, what does it mean when you have to take a dogleg to get someplace? The road has a dogleg in it they say. Yeah and I saw a dead possum too...
America, ya gotta love it.