By Kathy Hughes
Contributing Writer
Listening to news on the radio, the mention of “cat’s cradle” sent me off into a flight of mixed nostalgia and wonderment. The reference in the news story compared the conflict in Syria to a “cat’s cradle.” Now there’s a term not heard in a while.
Remarkably, my mother remembered how to play Cat’s Cradle, a game from her childhood. It is a string game, using complex manipulation to produce a specific pattern, called cat’s cradle. This is only a first step in a series of moves producing other specific formations. I tried, and, unlike my mother, I could not reproduce the moves using a loop of string threaded between my fingers.
What is a cat’s cradle, and where in the world does it come from?
A Google search produced a slew of analogies and metaphors, most prominently the title of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel. I’d forgotten other references, too; such as, Don McLean’s enigmatic song, “American Pie” took me back to 1971, with the words:
And the cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man on the moon . . .
Talk about, an enigma within an enigma! Truly, Kurt Vonnegut expressed the mystery of cat’s cradle very simply.
‘A cat’s cradle is nothing but a bunch of X’s between somebody’s hands,
and little kids look and look and look at all those X’s . . .’
‘And?’
‘No damn cat, and no damn cradle.’
As it turns out, this string game is played by children all over the world, including Asia and Africa. It has other names and variations in the shapes, but the process is the same. But what is most strange is exactly, what is a cat’s cradle? It has no associations in English other than the game itself.
Many experts are just as perplexed as the rest of us, but there are always theories. One theory is that the game was originally called “cratch cradle.” Okay, but what is a “cratch?”
Now, pretty well extinct, a cratch refers to a feed box, or manger. A manger is very like a cradle in its hollow, rectangular shape.
I’m not sure that the mystery of Cat’s Cradle has been satisfactorily solved. Yet, maybe that is a good thing to be a puzzle from the past that we don’t know what it is, or why we do it, and perhaps it has always been a mystery.
