Meaning
To say or do something that causes sudden uproar, alarm, or scandal among a previously settled or complacent group - most often by revealing a controversial fact or secret. The idiom takes the group's viewpoint: the disturber is the cat, and the shocked company is the pigeons. In American English the phrase is understood but reads British. Avoid it in formal writing where a plain verb like provoke would do. Regional use: Chiefly British English (also common in Australian, Indian, and Commonwealth English).
Origin
The image is self-evident - a cat loose among confined, fluttering birds. A Spanish antecedent appears in John Stevens's 1706 Spanish-English dictionary ('the cat is in the dove-house'), though with a different sense, said of a man got among the women. The earliest known English evidence, dug out by Word Histories, comes from Yorkshire: the Leeds Chartist paper the Northern Star reported in February 1841 that a speaker had put the cat among the pigeons, and in 1843 the paper's editor William Hill wrote that news of organized Chartism puts the cat amongst the pigeons with a vengeance - the quotation marks suggesting the phrase was already common speech. A popular story ties the idiom to a colonial-Indian pastime of penning a wild cat with pigeons and betting on how many birds it could fell; that claim rests largely on a 2006 Times of India piece and its Wikipedia echo, which carries an accuracy-dispute flag, and the Yorkshire evidence makes the Indian link unproven. Agatha Christie's 1959 novel Cat Among the Pigeons is the set phrase's most famous showcase.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- put the cat among the pigeons
- set the cat among the pigeons
- throw the cat amongst the pigeons
Usage Examples
- By revealing the merger talks over dinner, Priya threw the cat among the pigeons and left the board scrambling for a response.
- The auditor's blunt question about expenses set the cat among the pigeons; within an hour three managers had offered to resign.
- His offhand remark about changing the wedding date put the cat among the pigeons with both families before dessert was served.