“What is up, dog?”
Side note: the opposite of cat isn’t actually dog. The opposite of cat is goldfish. A goldfish loves water, is not fluffy, doesn’t exterminate every bird for sport, will never knock your favorite coffee mug off your desk, not bipolar, and I’m not allergic to them.
The opposite of cat is antimatter cat. When they come together, you have an explosion 18,000 times larger than Nagasaki.
The absence of a cat implies nothing is there. So the opposite of a cat is nothing (specifically nothing where a cat should have been).
So, another acceptable answer would be “what is up? Nothing.”
The absence of a cat implies the absence of a cat. There could be a dog instead or a Gasplanet which has a species of conscious whales wearing silly hats rolling in the mud to communicate the need for a fruity beverage. It could be anything, it could be nothing. It is not possible, from the given facts, to come to any concrete conclusion besides that a cat, is in fact, absent.
will never knock your favorite coffee mug off your desk,
I once shared a house with someone who had a fish that would thrash around in its tank so violently it would knock things off the cabinet it was on and get water all over the floor (I had no involvement in the care of the fish, but I think its tank was too small).
Not a goldfish, but still…
How do you know you’re not allergic? Have you ever rubbed one over your most delicate parts?
If dog is not the opposite of cat, then why did everyone immediately know the answer is dog? Hmm 🤔
…when i was in second grade i wrote a book report on chocolate fever, in which the climax involved the protagonist taking vanilla pills, which were so obviously the opposite of chocolate to my eight-year-old perspective, but which no adults with whom i discussed the book found at all obvious…
I seem to remember a youtube video from years ago explaining how things can be opposites in different ways, like glue is the opposite of scissors because of the use, red is the opposite of blue because of what they represent, etc.
The wiki article lists a few categories like gradable words that exist on a spectrum (hot/cold), complementary or binary pairs with no spectrum (entrance/exit, moral/immoral), and relational types that only make sense in a certain context (teacher/student).
I’ve never thought this hard about this before and I’m finding myself suddenly glad that other people have. This is really neat.
I didn’t. I was like huh there is no opposite of cat, then read the title, then got even more confused… How does anyone think the answer is dog?
In no logical way does cat being the opposite of dog make sense. It’s just a typical association because there was always a stronger cat vs dog stereotype in media as I was growing up. I learned that cats and dogs don’t get along, are mortal enemies, etc. This of course isn’t true, but it’s overly portrayed in media that way.
What would be the opposite of any mammal? A carrot? A brick? A slime mold?
Does everything actually have an “opposite”?
Humans (like most living things) like to put things in boxes to make navigating their environment simpler. Temperatures aren’t really opposites because they’re on a continuum, but we talk about hot and cold as opposites to bring order to environmental navigation. The same with presence and absence of light and bright/dark. So, extending this logic, the opposite of cat is the absence of cat, but that doesn’t really make sense. If you cut a cat in half, are you halfway on a continuum from cat to the opposite of cat? If the cat is whole but has died, is it cat, opposite of cat, something else entirely? I have no idea, and no one else really does either. Brains are weird.
What is undown anticat?
I would phrase it as, “What is ‘up’ and ‘dog?’” Being extra clear but ruining the joke.