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This makes me realize I’ve been misinterpreting bell the cat references my whole life. I thought it was about team work. My mother told me a version that had t
by onionisafruit 1y ago
This makes me realize I’ve been misinterpreting bell the cat references my whole life. I thought it was about team work.
My mother told me a version that had the mice building some rube goldberg contraption to get the bell on the cat. It’s a very different lesson from what’s described here. I wonder if she got her version from someone else or if it was her addition to avoid teaching me a cynical lesson.
- JdeBP 1y agoIn fairness, there have been a lot of versions of this over the past 15 centuries, not always with the same moral. The Wikipedia writers here have not plumbed the full depths of this, and have not yet reached Paul Franklin Baum. * https://www.jstor.org/stable/2915573 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2915573 Nor have they incorporated that one Piers Plowman text had a proposal to kill the cat, not to bell it. * https://www.jstor.org/stable/4172513 https://www.jstor.org/stable/4172513
- jacobolus 1y agoYou should feel free to contribute to the Wikipedia article.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoYeah, when I came across it recently (I was looking at it for inclusion in a free "Primer" for school-age kids I am creating) I realized it was a lot more cynical than I remembered. I think it's hard to draw any other conclusion (at least from the versions I found online) that it's really about individuals wanting someone else to do a thing that they are afraid to do. "Talk is cheap" could be the moral they append to the end (I hate those though and am stripping those off for the fables that I am re-printing).
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]