Talk:Moggy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Cats Portal This article is supported by the Cats WikiProject. This project provides a central approach to Cat-related subjects on Wikipedia. Please participate by editing the article, and help us assess and improve articles to good and 1.0 standards, or visit the wikiproject page for more details.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the Project's quality scale. Please rate the article and then leave a short summary here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article.

I tend to regard this as peculiarly Australian, though I know that it comes from a pet name for "Margaret". I'm familiar with the term because of the Eric Bogle song He's Nobody's Moggy Now. Eclecticology

Eric Bogle is of UK origin. He came to Australia as an adult (he even wrote a song about it :)) I figured that the term was English/Australian. Seriously, what do they call common-or-garden domestic cats in other countries? We should add it. KJ

The only term I've ever heard (other than roundabout descriptions like ordinary cat, regular cat, non-purebred cat, etc.) in Canada is moggy. - Montréalais

In America, it's just a plain ol' mixed-breed cat. Maybe I'll try to get people to start using the word "moggy" :) [[User:Lachatdelarue|Lachatdelarue (talk)]]

I'm from Australia, and 'Moggy' was definately slang for 'cat' whilst growing up... and the schoolyard explanation of the word is that it was from the schoolyard joke: 'How do you spell cat?' ... "M-o-g" (write it on paper each letter above the other. M = ears, o = head, g = body + tail). If cat is spelt m-o-g, it's only natural to pronounce it as 'mog' too :) Has anyone else heard this origin? If so, it should go into the article proper... --Nemo 01:19, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

This is a back-formation. I've never come across this in Britain, although 'moggy' is the common colloquial term for a cat. John G Walker 14:35, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

I was surprised to read that the term was first recorded as late as 1911. Does anypone have a refernce for this? The fact that 'moggy' is in use for a cat in Britain but not the USA suggests that its origin dates from after 1776, but the fact that it's found in Australia and Canada would make me suspect that it dates from the nineteenth century not the early twentieth. However, I'm not a sociolinguist so I'm willing to be put right by anyone who has the facts. John G Walker 14:35, 26 February 2006 (UTC)