cat's cradle
1
8.1
- noun
- /kæts ˈkreɪdəl/
:
cuna de gato
- One does not win at cat's cradle; the goal is more interesting and open-ended than that.
Examples
-
Cat's cradle invites a sense of collective work, of one person not being able to make all the patterns alone.
Academic text (2015) -
I kissed her cheek, then showed the children how to make cat's cradles.
Fiction book (2002) -
Cat's cradle is about patterns and knots; the game takes great skill and can result in serious surprises.
Academic text (2015) -
One person can build up a large repertoire of string figures on a single pair of hands, but the cat's cradle figures can be passed back and forth on the hands of several players, who add new moves in the building of complex patterns.
Academic text (2015) -
Children love to play cat's cradle during recess, creating beautiful shapes with string.
-
At the birthday party, the kids gathered around to learn cat's cradle from their older siblings.
-
As they passed the string back and forth, they enjoyed the challenge of making a complex cat's cradle design.
How Tangled
Surface Forms
Morphology
cat's + cradle
Knowing 'cat' (an animal) and 'cradle' (a small bed) does not allow a B1 learner to infer the specialized meaning of a string‑figure game or the metaphorical sense of a tangled situation. The phrase is a lexicalized idiom/name for a specific game and its figurative extension is not compositionally predictable, so learners will need prior exposure.
Etymology
Cat's cradle may come from the way a loop of string makes shapes that look like a tiny bed, a cradle, where a cat might sit. That's why people use cat's cradle to mean a 'complicated' or 'tangled' situation.