海角大神

If viral social media posts are anything to go by, dogs that unexpectedly discover food will return to the magical spot where it happened again and again, sometimes for years. One owner tweeted that his dog never fails to investigate a bush in which it sniffed out a lasagna three years earlier; another dog has been going every day for five years to check out a gutter that once produced a sausage. This tenacity is key to the meaning of the verb dog 鈥� to 鈥渇ollow (someone or their movements) closely and persistently.鈥�

Many animal names have undergone such verbification, as the process of turning nouns into verbs is called. Sometimes, as with dog, the verb takes its meaning from a particular characteristic of the animal. To parrot is to 鈥渞epeat by rote鈥� without understanding, like a macaw that can say 鈥淧olly want a cracker鈥� without knowing what it means. Beavers are hardworking engineers of the animal world, cutting down trees with their front teeth and using the wood to build elaborate dams, so it鈥檚 not hard to see how beaver (away) came to mean 鈥渨ork energetically.鈥� If you have watched a squirrel burying nuts for the winter, squirrel (away) 鈥� 鈥渟tore up for future use鈥� 鈥� makes a lot of sense. With badgers it鈥檚 the opposite. They are reclusive creatures that live underground, but badger means 鈥渉arass persistently.鈥�

In other cases, the animal-verb relationship reflects something done to the animal. The British verb winkle (out) captures the fiddly process of eating periwinkles, which are small marine snails. 鈥淚 winkled the recipe out of my mother鈥� implies that you had to work to get her to reveal her secret, just as it can be a struggle to get a tasty but tiny winkle out of its spiral shell.

And sometimes words that look like verbified animal names are not. I had always assumed that flounder (鈥渢o struggle to move or obtain footing: thrash about wildly鈥�) came from the way flounders wriggle around to bury themselves in the sand; it actually appears to be related to the verb founder, as in 鈥渢he ship foundered on the rocks.鈥� In its origins, quail (鈥渉e quailed at the thought鈥�) has nothing to do with small, shy birds scattering in fear, but rather shares a root with quell, 鈥渟uppress.鈥� Likewise cow (鈥渢o destroy the resolve or courage of鈥�) and carp (鈥渢o find fault or complain鈥�) cast no aspersions on cattle or fish, as these verbs are also unrelated.

Cats are the most recent animals to be verbified. To cat means simply to 鈥渁ct like a cat,鈥� which involves a quiet dignity. Viral lists of 鈥�18 cats who forgot how to cat,鈥� though, show felines with their heads stuck in vases or sleeping belly up, offering strong evidence that cat should instead be defined as to 鈥済et tangled up in the window blinds.鈥�