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I have always believed --- from somewhere --- that in archaic English, cats were always referred to using feminine pronouns, regardless of what sex they actually were. But I thought to go and find a reference for it and I can't find anything.

Was this ever a real thing, or was I just hallucinating?

David Given
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    Why People Think of All Dogs as Male and All Cats as Female. – Stuart F Oct 04 '23 at 12:18
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    'I thought to go and find a reference for it': the 'think to Vinf' construction, less of a negative polarity item than it once was. – Edwin Ashworth Oct 04 '23 at 14:10
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    I thought I remembered an earlier thread about this, but I can't find it. I commented that I had read somewhere that the Victorians maintained a polite fiction that dogs were male and cats female (to avoid anything so indelicate as looking to see which an individual was), but could not find any references. – Kate Bunting Oct 04 '23 at 14:19
  • Are you speculating or you've read somewhere? Also, do you mean obsolete usage instead of archaic? Do we include Old English? For example, in Old English, nouns had a grammatical gender (just like German today) and animal names had a grammatical gender too. However, there were two versions of "cat" in Old English: cat or catt (masculine), catte (feminine). – ermanen Oct 04 '23 at 15:30
  • It's also notable that in French, "chat" is masculine. – Barmar Oct 04 '23 at 16:09
  • @StuartF I knew of a primary school teacher who taught that "toads are male frogs". – Weather Vane Oct 04 '23 at 18:25
  • Whorf mentions it as a case of covert gender agreement. As the owner of a female dog and later a male cat I can testify that people do use he/him/his for dogs and she/her/hers for cats, unless they're intimate enough to know the actual gender. – John Lawler Oct 04 '23 at 19:30
  • @ermanen I'm thinking more recently that Old English, more 1700s or 1800s. I could swear that I saw an actual reference somewhere, but I don't remember where. Kate Bunting reports the same thing. – David Given Oct 04 '23 at 20:59
  • @EdwinAshworth I'm Scottish, which means I get a whole pile of extra grammatical weirdness on top of what British English already has! – David Given Oct 04 '23 at 21:00
  • It's used a lot in the church I'm part of: "I thought to go over and see X" / "I thought to speak on the need to see God ruling even when world events appear to go from bad to worse." ... Fifty years ago, I'd only have found "I just didn't think to go over and see X" grammatical. – Edwin Ashworth Oct 05 '23 at 12:07

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