Words with Webster: Flehmen, Plus Friendly Fill-Ins

We have two fun Friday features for you today. First up is Real Cat Webster, who has a lip-curling word to share. After that, it’s on to Friendly Fill-Ins!

Words with Webster

Hi, everybody! It’s me, Real Cat Webster. Welcome to Words with Me. Today’s word is “flehmen” (I got the idea for this word from Catster). If you have spent much time around cats, you might not recognize this word, but I bet you’ve seen the thing it describes. I looked in my favorite dictionary, Merriam-Webster’s and found out “flehmen” means

a mammalian behavior (as of horses, cows, or elephants) in which the animal inhales with the mouth open and upper lip curled to facilitate exposure of Jacobsen's organ to a scent or pheromone.

I thought that was pretty interesting because I never knew other animals did this; I thought it was just a cat thing. Anyway, you know that thing your cat does sometimes where he opens his mouth and curls his lip and generally gets a funny look on his face when he smells something weird? That’s a flehmen response. Like this:

But we think you can see it better here:

Our concern today is with the word rather than the behavior (read the Catster article to find out more about that), so next I went to the Oxford English Dictionary, where I learned that this is a really recent word in English. Its first known use in print was in 1970:

Flehmen or lipcurl was quite common [in a herd of captive giraffes], usually by a male to the urine of a female. (Journal of Mammalogy 51, 270)

Compared to some words we’ve done, “flehmen” had a short trip to get to English. It came straight from the German Flehmen, which according to Dictionary.com means

(of a domestic ungulate) to curl the lip.

So next time you see your cat do this, remember the flehmen response is something she has in common with cows, horses and even elephants and giraffes!

 

Friendly Fill-Ins

And now it’s time for Friendly Fill-Ins, from 15andmeowing and McGuffy’s Reader. They are a fun way to learn a little bit about the authors of the blogs you read. The first two questions, answered by old SoLT this week, are from Ellen of 15andmeowing, and the next two, answered by Real Cat Paisley, are from Annie of McGuffy’s Reader.

Old SoLT’s answers:

1. I have never been able to sew. I have no aptitude for sewing, no patience for it, and even sewing one button on a shirt is an exercise in frustration.

2. I wish I could still run. It used to feel so good to run when I was much, much younger, but now running just sounds painful—and exhausting.

Real Cat Paisley’s answers:

3.  Curled up on Mommy’s lap is my ideal winter night.

4. Trick a staff member into thinking you haven’t been fed yet and you might get to eat dinner twice. I try this a lot, and sometimes it works!