Where does 'curiosity killed the cat' come from?
No cats were harmed in the making of this idiom
Cats occupy a peculiar place in the English language and its idioms. They let the bag out; they get someone's tongue; they drag things in. And for several centuries now, something has been killing them, although what that something is has changed over time. The phrase we know today (curiosity killed the cat) is a relative newcomer, appearing in printed use only from the end of the 19th century.
Well, I have a most wonderful bit of news to tell you. It will keep Miss Baxter racing round for a week. Wonders will never cease! Curiosity killed the cat; Kitten, don’t be so anxious.”
New Dominion Monthly (Montreal, Can.), 1 Sept. 1876It was the proverbial curiosity of the cat added to an unusual belligerence that sealed the downfall of the kitten in question.
— Maine Farmer (Augusta, ME), 1 Nov. 1883“Curiosity killed the cat, Gertie!” laughed her brother.
— The London Reader, 25 Apr. 1891
However, for almost 300 years before this cats were being idiomatically slain by another word: care. Not care as in carefulness, but as in an older sense: worry, grief, sorrow. Care killed a cat carried the warning that anxiety and fretting are, in the long run, fatal (a sentiment that would not feel out of place in a 17th-century self-help book).
Ben Jonson used that older form in his comedy Every Man in His Humour, published in 1601: "Helter skelter, hang sorrow, care will kill a cat, vptailes all, and a poxe on the hangman." Shakespeare reached for the same expression the following year in Much Ado About Nothing: "What, courage man! what though care killed a cat, thou hast mettle enough in thee to kill care.”
For the next two and a half centuries, care did the killing. It is not obvious what caused the change to curiosity, although it may be explained by a shift in the phrase’s meaning, moving from ‘worrying is bad for your health’ to ‘asking too many questions is bad for you.’ As for the original warning (that worry and sorrow are the real killers): that version has fallen so thoroughly out of use that most people today would just find it confusing. There may a lesson in that, too, but if there is it does not yet have an idiom attached to it.
