Copyediting and Aristotle's cat

 Suppose you were a young copyeditor and came across this sentence:

Biologists have been interested in cats since the days of Aristotle, who had a tabby named Moderation.

 

One of my many failings as a newspaper editor was my inability to interest some of my younger colleagues in sentences like this. We trained editors to work on the writing, that is, the English. We didn’t say enough about other kinds of problems.

Writing in newspapers should be improved. But the editors who get a first crack at the copy ought to see or smell problems that have nothing to do with the writing.

Aristotle wrote a lot about animals but said little about cats, other than to remark that they seemed lecherous. (A sexist, he blamed the females.) Although he preached moderation in all things, there’s no record of an Aristotelian cat by that name. Aside from the problem with the name, there's no record of Aristotle having a cat. Aristotle said nothing about having a cat. Aristotle’s enemies, who never missed a chance to parody him, also were silent.

The ancient Greeks, who talked the world’s ears off about many things, didn’t say much about cats. Cats appeared on coins in Greek communities in Sicily in the 5^th century BCE. They were known, but we don't know whether they were common. At least some people relied on weasels to discourage rodents. Herodotus reported on the Egyptians’ love of cats as if his fellow Greeks might have found the notion unusual, perhaps excessive.

That’s a bit of the history that a good copyeditor might bring to this sentence. The biology is even more problematic. Geneticists studying the evolution of domestic cats have concluded that the tabby markings on the coats of some cats emerged in medieval times. Tabby cats didn’t exist in Classical Greece.

The main problem with our original sentence about Aristotle’s cat is that it’s not true. Before we get to the problems with the writing, we ought to think about how we can keep sentences like that out of the paper.

If we could get better at keeping ordinary falsehoods out of print, we might do better with the political  varieties.