Curiouser and curiouser

Idioms are the bane of a literal mind, and if you’re anywhere on the spectrum, you know the pain of being told you take things too literally. It’s not that we autistics can’t get idioms, it’s that we’re likely to ask questions about their meaning, their origins, and if there’s one thing neurotypicals don’t like, it’s a lot of neurodiverse questions. I don’t know why that is, but I have a two-part theory:

  1. It’s like dealing with a full grown toddler, because that was the last time their neurotypical mind was that curious about the world, and it’s disconcerting to hear a post-pubescent voice asking the same things you’d hear in your average preschool.
  2. All of us, but neurotypicals especially, conclude early in life that it’s just best not to ask too many questions, because the answers end up being somewhere between frightening and depressing, and there isn’t enough Xanax to cover it all.

Thanks to TikTok and an autistic Man Of A Certain Age whose wife asks him questions about his ’tism, my own curiosity about idioms—their origins, their meanings—has been resurrected, and since there’s currently a cat pacing across the desk here trying his best to get me to pet him instead of wasting precious hand gestures on typing, this one’s bouncing around in there:

Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought him back.

The origins of this, like many such things, are murky, and until today I hadn’t heard the second half. I had a friend that used to end it with, “…but it also broke the sound barrier” which resonated with my all-things-jet-plane special interest for years.

Cats are curious creatures, and I’m sure that’s led to fatalities, but the implication to me is that someone coined the first half of the phrase to get their kid to stop asking so many questions, and then came up with the second half to show that while curiosity could be a bad thing, in the next life you’d return having learned something valuable.

Which actually doesn’t resolve the issue at all, because was the author advocating for reincarnation? Was this the first draft of Pet Sematary? Or did someone just hate their kid’s cat and was trying to explain why Fluffy wasn’t around anymore as the feline had somehow wandered on some quest for personal meaning and would return once enlightened, that was was “killed” was the lack of knowledge, and the animal, or whoever was being so pervasively curious, would have ascended to some higher plane after the death of the less-enlightened self?

I might need more hobbies.