Cat House

Hey, look--it's a cat! That can only mean it's time for Friday Cat Blogging!

When not engaged in the relentless search for food and/or something to bite, Mister Picklesworth wants to know: which of these words is not like the others?

Catastrophe
Catamite
Catamount
Catafalque

Mr. P. may have a brain the size of a walnut, but he has figured out that all four of these words are completely unrelated, as the apparent "cata-" prefix comes from a different source in each case.

"Catamount" is the only actual cat word in the group. It's a shortened version of "cat of the mountain", which is to say a mountain lion. (The Latin name for the mountain lion, by the way, is "felis concolor", and this second word means exactly what you might expect it to mean: "all of one colour", rather than being spotted, blotched or tabby the way many wild cats are.)

"Catamite" means, according to Answers.com, either "a boy who has a sexual relationship with a man" (keeping the definition judgement-free) or "a boy kept for purposes of sexual perversion". It's from an Etruscan corruption of the Latinized version of the Greek name Ganymede, Zeus' cup-bearer and, it would seem, boyfriend.

"Catafalque" looks as if it ought to be Greek as filtered through French, but in fact the apparent prefix is a mere accident of history; the word (which means "a framework on which a coffin rests") is a rather elaborately evolved relative of "scaffolding".

"Catastrophe" is a good example of by far the most common example of the "cata-" prefix in English. It's Greek, of course; a glance will tell you that. "Cata-" generally means "down" or "reversed", and "-strophe" means "a turning" (as in boustrophedonic), so a catastrophe looks as if it should really just be a downturn; in fact, it means "an overturning"--that is, ruination.