Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Catnap (by DMcC)

Hello all... My assistant slang-o-rama-ist, the euphonious DMcC (aka Devyn McConachie), returns with another post for your edification. Enjoy! - Ann

Devyn McConachie is a designer-editor-cartoonist, currently lurking about Portland, Oregon. Were it not for her wobbly landlubber legs and love of indoor-living, she would absolutely have taken up a career as a sea-pirate. Landlocked as she is, she instead fills her days with graphic design, animation, illustration, and copy editing.

For more info and to view her visual portfolio, visit this here link

 She also has an Etsy shop (arts, hats, and cards) right here 

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As the days stretch longer and warmer, filled with buzzing of bees and rustling of leaves, I find myself more and more often nodding off in the afternoon, dazedly daydreaming of a sweet siesta... 

And I’m not alone—Ann’s office assistant, the Diva Miss Mia, is well-known for her slumbering prowess. With a snooze after every meal and regular dozes in the office, she’s always sleeping on the job. She is, undoubtedly, a master of the cat-nap.

The skilled snoozer, the Diva Miss Mia, prepares to catch her forty furry winks.

Now there’s a word! Before my eyelids droop too far, let’s see where cat-napping came from... 

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 The Online Etymology Dictionary defines the noun cat-nap (also spelled catnap or cat’s nap) as “a short, light sleep,” which was first recorded in 1823; cat-nap as a verb emerged in 1859.

As I was prowling the web for more snooze clues, I came across an interesting tidbit of research: most animals have polyphasic sleep patterns, meaning that they sleep in more than one chunk each day. And according to research by historian A. Roger Ekirch, until relatively recently, we humans were polyphasic, too.

While studying letters, legal documents, medical records, and other written miscellany from before the Industrial Revolution, Ekrich came across the terms first sleep and second sleep. From context, he concluded that these were distinct periods of nighttime slumber, each lasting three or four hours, and with an hour or so of wakefulness in between. Those wee waking hours could be used for keeping watch, telling stories, interpreting dreams, committing petty crime, and any number of other activities.

How about that—two cat-naps a day, plus time to play!

-- But is she on her first or second sleep?
The Sleeping Beauty - Edward Burn-Jones, 1870-1890

And our snoozing tendencies didn’t stop with the Industrial Revolution. Consider the classic Mediterranean siesta (from the Latin sexta, or “sixth hour”), a post-lunch doze, popular in warm climates. Or how about the Japanese inemuri, the face-planting snooze of the exhausted and overworked?

Perhaps you’ve also heard of the power nap, a 10-30 minute daylight snooze (sometimes supplemented with a strong dose of coffee) for optimized productivity and cognitive performance. Somehow, though, the term power nap doesn’t hold the same appeal to me as the luxuriously lazy-sounding cat-nap.

So although the language has changed, perhaps we’ve always been catnappers at heart. As usual, maybe those cats know something that we don’t…

Two catnapping experts, hard at work.
Sleeping Girl (Girl With a Cat) - Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1880