Same reason you avoided stepping on joints between pavement stones when you were a kid
this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2026
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Protecting its mother's spine?
Becca also watched this cat arrange their paws for five minutes. Who actually wasted their time? No one, that's who.
even twitter has a soul
i'll get my coat
You don't ask why with cats.
The Contract must be abided.
Your cat is autistic. Actually, all cats might be.
when did it become acceptable to just call everything autism? i can tell you im pretty damn sick of it and it hasnt even been that long.
I mean, I am autistic, and I think this is funny and generally accurate enough to not be offensive.
Autists are very often all about creating and enforcing consistent, specific patterns.
A stance is a pattern.
I myself have been bored, and tried to do things like this, invent pose rules for myself, see the extent that I can succrssfully apply them.
Also, there are a lot more things cats will do, or traits they have, that are also broadly accurately common amongst autists.
Such as being very sensitive to light level changes.
They can literally see into the UV spectrum, so that kind of mirrors how autists often notice visual patterns that others don't.
They also tend to be hyperaware of even the most minute changes to their 'home' environments... autists tend to be that way too.
lol cats are also... rather comparitively bad at socializing, unless its with someone they know and trust quite well, or have been very well raised around well-behaved people and/or other animals.
Same thing happened with OCD as well. It's just natural changes in language. This one will pass as well and there will be a new word in a few years
true all around
edit ... on second thought, im not sure i agree its a "natural change in language" so much as it is a cultural meme that people just thoughtlessly parrot. so, i feel language hasnt changed so much as a term of the moment has. but anyway, im rambling. cheers.
so much as it is a cultural meme that people just thoughtlessly parrot.
Honestly, I think that's a big part of how language naturally evolves
agreed, but individual terms trending or not, dont equate a "change of the language" so much as a change of whats trending in said language. a semantic nitpick, to be sure. :)
... A prominent cultural meme that is widely adopted... literally is a natural evolution of language.
This is the extremely common and normal method by which languages change over time, which, with the exception of conlangs, they all do.
Go back to 1950 and tell an American English speaker that a song 'is fire'. Tell them that Elvis is just aura farming. Tell them that their fit is lacking.
They will be confused.
Take an American English speaker from 1950 to the present, and they tell you somebody made a boner at the lollapalooza they were last at.
You probably will not understand that to mean that somebody made a moderately significant mistake at a raccous party, like spilling their drink on the host, or bringing the wrong side dish.
is misusing the medical term widely adopted tho? or is it mostly online people that say / hear it?
im arguing that what is happening with the term isnt an aspect of the greater evolution of language, but that specific terms that come and go in a relatively short period of time do not equate a change of how people are doing language.
i appreciate the phrases you offered as examples, but i do not feel they are equivalents, as none of them are single words that are also literally medical terms.
im amused and delighted that we are having this discourse based on a hyper focus on a phrase. but i do hold firm that this is not a reflection of language changing as it is passing trend that in time may have no affect on the greater function of the language itself.
forgive me if i wasnt more concise earlier, im always high when im on here.
edit - i had to edit that a bunch. i should go to bed
No worries, I get what you're saying! (I think)
Yes, language changes over time.
Yes, some terms are basically just shot in the pan, fairly short lived fads... but, sometimes they stick around enough to distinctively form part of a kind of age bracket / location specific dialect, or even spread more broadly.
'Cool' 'Radical' 'Tubular' 'Groovy'... those are all older terms that were popularized by older age brackets, you can take a while bunch of millenialspeak/redditisms as examples as well, 'smolbean' 'chonker' 'adulting', etc.
But also yes, often, terms get reappropriated or basicslly misappropriated, kind of transmuted into having a just totally different meaning, which can then create a lot of confusion when some people are using a more original, domain specific meaning, and then there is a kind of nebulous, vague, commonplace usage of the term.
'Therapyspeak' as proliferated by Tiktok is a great example of the dangers and problems of that.
Tons of people misuing terms that have actual specific meanings, that they then almost always use to essentially weaponize their own narcissism.
There are tons of other more technical terms that have more specific meanings in some field of study, but then also have a vague or different colloquial meaning, and then people will just conflate the two different usage/meanings...
That's pretty much the basis of a bunch of woowoo, psuedo-intellectual, spiritual guru type nonsense, its also used by cults and con artists.
'Energy' in physics is not the same thing as 'energy' used to describe basically someone's demeanor, their current mood.
But, in another comment, up the chain in this thread, I did try to lay out how 'cats are autistic' is actually a reasonably accurate and defensible use of the term.
I think that if people are more commonly using complex terms... actually relatively correctly... that is just a good thing.
It normalizes the idea that yeah, autistic people exist, they are different, and thats ok, and its also ok to talk about how they are different, because maybe we can all understsnd and relate to them better by way of decently accurate analogies.
What would worry me is people using the term very incorrectly, accidentally or purposefully promoting false stereotypes, or just purely using 'autistic' as an insult.
So, I wanted to try and point out some of the details, have the conversation.
Essentially, I'm arguing that language does broadly change over time, and also, broader acceptance and discussion of how neurodivergence actually works is a good thing.
Is me doing that 'forced', not a 'natural' evolution of language? Eh, sure.
But if a whole bunch of people are also just... using the term autistic more frequently... well, I'm not in charge of all of them, but maybe I can try to at least... shape the flow of that river, so to speak, so that more people know more about the word they're now using more often.
Proper pawstage
It is funny how much cats enjoy different surfaces, leave out a notebook? Come out and a cat is sitting/laying on it, box left out? There's a cat in there now.
Piece of paper? You guessed it, cat butt plopped right down.
The days before vacation our cats were in or on luggage at all times. My cat (we all get one...so far) is a on someone's article of clothing. If there's no hoodie or jacket laying around he'll use a pile of laundry right next to a perfectly good cat bed.
My cat builds himself entire nests out of loose paper he finds laying around. We've come home to find him nestled on the middle of the couch on top of sheets of paper, looking very proud of himself.
Haha, semi-similar there was wrapping paper on the floor, he had clearly chewed it up/ripped it up and similarly made a nest of sorts on the pile. Cats are silly.
Same with mine. I started tossing that thin brown packing paper from deliveries into a corner behind an armchair. It's like his own little paper jungle and he loves it. Just have to remember to fluff it occasionally and pull out the old stuff.
And yet. Aluminum foil is a very anti cat material
We covered the beds with it while we're on vacation. Going to find out today how well it worked.
My cats do not gaf, though I have heard that mentioned before as a way to try and train them to not get on certain surfaces.
If not for sitting then why is square??
Defined spaces feel safer.
Floor is lava
Feels different. Thank you for attending my Ted Talk.
Paper is temporary. Ground is forever.
Whatever you do, do it right
"Why you ask ? Do you not realize how dirty this chair is ? I rub my butthole all over it all the time !" -cat
Is it the sound? My cat's absolute favorite toy was a felt ball with crinkly, noisy plastic in it. But she also loved sitting on card stock laid on soft surfaces.
All my cats have liked crinkly things. Maybe because it instinctively reminds them of the rustling of prey in grass?
Babies go nuts for crinkles for a few months of development. I wonder if it's related.
Possibly, although it wouldn't be because of the prey thing! More like it provides stimulating sensory feedback.
This is art
It is not your place to ask. It is your place to admire.
Goals
Why, says the human.
... who was playing Twister, the other day.
The ritual is complete
“Didn’t get second breakfast OR second dinner in AGES!! Mailing myself away”
I'm glad nobody is watching me all the time and making fun of the things I do and posting it to the internet. I don't know how many countless times I've done something even more worthless than trying to put my feet on a piece of paper.
For some reason our cat absolutely loves dragging/pulling a piece of paper on the floor. Leaves a tiny piece out and he’s moonwalking around the room with it.
Crinkly