Hear this episode and find out more about the beings and topics therein
at theallusionist.org/lexicat1
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, scoop language's litter box.
Today we're hearing from a cat, and the human she communicates with using a system of buttons each programmed with a word in English recorded by her human. Earlier this year my husband Martin and I got to spend a couple of days with Elsie the cat and Mary Robinette Kowal (the human) at Mary Robinette’s family home, and we got to see and hear the human-companion animal communication for ourselves. There’s so much to talk about that this is the first half of a two-parter, with lots more to come in the next episode, including a moment that shattered my heart into a thousand little bits.
Note: the Allusionist is not affiliated in any way with any companies that sell communication systems to use with animals, and I have not been paid to feature the people and animals that do use them. I’m just interested in how and why they do it.
Tickets are on sale now for the Allusionist’s tenth birthday live show at the Rio Theatre in Vancouver BC on 12 January 2025 at 2pm, love a matinee; we’ll be performing the show Souvenirs, about friends and friendship breakups and fonts and the history of the word ‘ass’, plus some special material just for and about Vancouver. There are still early bird discounts on tickets, the early bird catches the…discounts. And there are group discounts, so bring your retinue! I’ve linked to tickets at theallusionist.org/events.
Content note: there are category B swears in this episode.
On with the show.
Mary Robinette Kowal the human and Elsie the cat make eye contact while sitting on the floor with their button boards and my microphone.
HZ: You look angry at these microphones, Elsie.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Are are you going to sniff all the things, Elsie?
My name is Mary Robinette Kowal. I'm a science fiction author. I had a career as a professional puppeteer. And I also have this cat that uses buttons to talk. Her name is Elsie. and we may or may not have her join us in the interview. We'll find out.
HZ: Yes - she has not formally agreed to the interview, but she is in the room. So we're gonna see if she's up for it.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Yeah.
HZ: So how did you and Elsie first get into communicating with the buttons?
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: So Elsie was - is - the smartest cat that I've ever had. And so we did a lot of clicker training and tricks, because she was bored. And she would come up to me in the evening and tap my foot it clear that she wanted play, and I kept wishing there would be a way for her to play.
And then I was researching a novel that I was working on, and was looking at language acquisition in animals and during that process; I ran across Christina Hunger, the speech and language therapist, who taught her dog Stella to use buttons. And she's the one who pioneered this for animals. It's called Augmentative Interspecies Communication, or AIC. And I was like, okay, but is this actual language acquisition or is this just lucky chance, or stimulus response? And then I saw a sequence where Stella - one of her buttons was not working and she's looking at the button board and then presses "go outside water". And the button that was broken was “beach”.
HZ: Wow!
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Right! Right? The layers that she has to know!
HZ: Canine thesaurus time.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: That was the first one that made me go, Oh, okay, this is a thing. Let me try doing this with Elsie. And all I really wanted was for her to be able to tell me what toy she wanted, what she wanted to play. I did not expect us to end up where we are. She has a hundred and twenty words. I have daily conversations with my cat. We talk about everything from what she wants to play to things like grief. Not what I was expecting.
ZAZIE TODD: I'm Zazie Todd. I'm the author of three books about dogs and cats, the most recent being Bark: the Science of Helping Your Anxious, Fearful or Reactive Dog, the other two being Wag and Purr, about happy dogs and cats, and I also write a blog called Companion Animal Psychology, which is about the science of dogs and cats and how we can help them to live happier lives.
HZ: I mentioned to a few people that I was going to be talking to you and they said, "That sounds like the coolest job in the world."
ZAZIE TODD: Hehehe! That's nice. It's fun, yes.
HZ: What do you like best about it?
ZAZIE TODD: Who doesn't love a happy dog or a happy cat?
HZ: Evil people.
ZAZIE TODD: Exactly. It's so nice to know that you're helping to make cats and dogs happy. And it makes the person happier too, so it's a very positive thing to be thinking of.
HZ: Zazie Todd is an animal behaviour expert, so I was interested in her opinion on the button communication.
ZAZIE TODD: Although I haven't taught my own dog and cat to use buttons, I do think it's a very positive thing for people to do if they feel like doing it, because it involves paying more attention to what your dog and cat would like, and that is always a good thing I think. Because it's not so easy for dogs to ask us or cats to ask us for specific things, although they can use their body language, they can meow or bark, and they can look at us and stare at us. And we do know that dogs and cats will do these things. So I think there's a lot of communication that we probably don't always notice or aren't necessarily paying attention to.
I guess if you're looking at how animals understand human language, it goes back quite a long way, to some studies that would not be done now, with chimpanzees, for example, and the story of Washoe being taught sign language and Kanzi being taught how to use a board to press signs and kind of, quote, "speak" in that way. So that research goes back quite a long way, and wasn't good for the animals because they often had to come and live in a human environment which is not suitable for them.
But we need a lot more research on it. And I think it will come. And the fact that there are so many people using the buttons means a lot of it will be citizen science, which is nice because there's a value to experimental research in the lab, but there's also a lot of value to studying how the buttons are being used in everyday life by ordinary people with their pets.
The button boards Elsie uses.
HZ: So let's describe what we're looking at. We've got these hexagonal rubber mats in different colours that slot together, and they've got these buttons on. The buttons are, let's say, about an inch and a half in diameter, and there's up to seven per tile.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: It’s six per tile.
HZ: Oh yes, sorry.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: There would be space for seven per tile, but there's an empty spot. The buttons that Elsie uses is from a company called Fluent Pet, and they leave an empty spot for the animal, basically, to put their paw, so that there's a stepping spot.
HZ: Learners usually start with a few buttons, then more button tiles can be added to the board as required. Elsie now has 120ish buttons in her board, and each is programmed with a word in Mary Robinette’s voice. And on each button the word is printed and there’s sometimes a little symbol there too, like the button that has the word ‘ball’ has a Wingdings-style picture of a ball on it. The words are chosen by Mary Robinette, and she’ll change them if Elsie doesn’t use them, and add new ones as Elsie needs them. Elsie’s button use is also recorded on camera and in a log, so later Mary Robinette can find out what the cat has said in her absence, and check on patterns in Elsie’s communications, and try to understand things she couldn’t decode in the moment.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: The arrangement of the buttons is based on English linguistics. You've got actions, you've got descriptions, you have places, you have what are called social -
ELSIE: Box. Catnip.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: “Box catnip”? Box catnip - that was what Elsie just asked me for. This is a game that she came up with. she's asking for a game. She's not just asking for a treat.
ELSIE: Litter box.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: “Litter box” was her cursing at me. it is basically like, "this is some bullshit".
HZ: Some cat shit.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: This is some cat shit. She has a literal potty mouth, because I did not get up and do the “box catnip”, because she can tell that I'm not paying attention to her.
HZ: Sorry for distracting your human, Elsie.
The majority of the buttons’ words are nouns, with some adjectives, some question words like ‘where’ and ‘why’; there’s ‘bye’ and ‘yes’ and ‘no…
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: It's animate actions, descriptions, inanimate places, and social. So animate and inanimate: the original way they were describing it was subject and object. I'm like, that's a grammar thing and that did not feel like it was going to be a meaningful way for us to divide them. So I divided them into inanimate nouns and animate nouns. “Bird” is over on the animate nouns, "litter box" and "hair tie" on the inanimate. “Hair tie” is an example of a word that has shifted meaning with her, because it was originally just a literal hair tie that I would fling.
HZ: Then Elsie took the flinging part of her interaction with the hair tie and matched that with the term “hair tie”, so now when she uses her “hair tie” button she is asking for a toy to be thrown.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: And then social are things like "high", "scared", question words like "what", "where", "thank you", "sweet", "rude". And then we've got descriptions and, and it’s like, is this a description or is this a social word? Like “sweet”.
HZ: She's probably gonna care about that distinction less than you.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Yeah, yeah, exactly. She has time words, “later”, “now”, “soon”, “all done”, “then”. I have a couple of parts of speech words that I've put in just to sort of see what would happen: “is”, “and”, “or”. And those are significantly harder to model, and are in the 20 percent of words where I'm like, “I don't know that she has any idea what this means.”
HZ: It was a time commitment to get to this point, where Elsie is using more than 120 buttons.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: When we started, it took her six months to use buttons. And there are a couple of things that would have made it go faster. I started with one word, and it was a word that we already had a good system of communication for, so she was like, why am I doing this?
HZ: Which word?
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: "Open." because I was following - most of the guidelines early on were all for dog. And so the suggested word was "outside", which is a high-value word for a dog, and not a thing we could do with Elsie. And I was like, cats always want to be on the other side of a door, so we'll give her "open". But the problem was that she had a very good system, which was that she would go to the door and she would stand on her hind legs and she would pat the doorknob with her hand and then she would yell at you.
HZ: Yep, that sounds persuasive.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Yep. and it was super clear. And she's like, "why am I doing this other thing? " So, now the way I would do it and the way we did this with our dog, was that I would start with two or three words, and in kind slightly different categories. I would have started her witha treat word. And a lot of people don't want to do that because they think their animal is going to only ask for treats. And she will use it, but it's not her most common word.
HZ: So you said for the first few months she -
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: She just just didn't press them at all.
HZ: How did you get her participate?
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: I finally looked at the motion that she was doing, which was she would stand up to pat the doorknob. so I taped the button next to the doorknob. And just every time I pushed open the door, I'd press "open". And then, I noticed that she was putting her weight on the door with one paw while she was reaching up. So I put the button there. That was starting to work.
And then I saw - Justin Bieber the cat posted a video on target training, where you teach the animal how press the button in exchange for treats, like a trick. And so I did target training with Elsie and, that's kind of when things started to really move, and we were starting to add two to three words a week. So her vocabulary just went from "Is she doing this?" to "Oh, she's definitely doing this."
The first time with Elsie where I thought, “Oh, this is a thing that is actually happening, she is using this to communicate,” was: she pressed the “open” button, and so I went and I opened the door to the hallway, and she pressed it again, and I'm like, Elsie, the door is open. Open. Open, open, open. I'm like, And I realized the bedroom door was shut, so I'm like, okay, well, here's another door I can open. And she went straight to the bedroom door, and I was like, “Oh! This is amazing, because she's generalized it from this one door to this second door.” At this point, she had less than ten words. So I opened the door and she went in, and her water bowl was in there, which it is not normally. She beelined for the water bowl and she started to drink. And she did not have a word for water. I was like, okay, this was definitely her using the button to get a thing that she needed. And then she finished drinking and went back to her button board and said, "Open. Love you."
HZ: How did it feel when your cat said, “Love you”?
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: It was like, I'm not gonna lie. I got really kind of a little teary there. And she didn't have a thank you button, so I'm certain that there are other ways to read it, but I don't know how to read it other than her thanking me for doing the thing that she had asked me for. It's wonderful when cat rubs against you, but what is even more wonderful is when a cat rubs against you, walks across the room to press "love you", and then come back to rub against you, you're like, well, this is unambiguous. It's like, don't mind me, my heart just grew three sizes.
ZAZIE TODD: People have such stereotypes about cats that are quite negative, and I think that would play into what people think about there. Whereas, actually, cats that are well socialized around people, as kittens, I would say they do love us; I think they do care about us, and you can see that, for example, by the fact that many cats will follow people around the house. They will choose to be in the same room as you, even if they don't actually want to sit on your lap. For a cat, just being close to you counts as being affectionate and friendly, and you being part of their social circle, and the way they come and rub their heads on you and things like that, and so on. I think it's negative stereotypes that cats really get in the way of what they're thinking there. I think cats don't get the credit that they're due, really. But we do also treat cats very differently than dogs. For example, in terms of socialization, puppies get taken out and about and introduced to lots of people, and we know that during the sensitive period for socialization, we have to introduce them to a wide range of things and people and other puppies and so on. And that kind of thing doesn't happen with cats. And in part, that's because their sensitive period is between two and seven weeks. So it happens before the cat comes to live in your home.
HZ: Wow, so early.
ZAZIE TODD: Yes, really early, so there's less that you can do. What you can do instead is build on that socialization. But the the most important stuff has already happened at the home of the breeder. Whereas for a puppy you're sharing that responsibility with the breeder, so it starts with the breeder and then you get to continue it. So that's one difference. And the other thing is that we have quite different expectations for cats and dogs.
We expect that if we say to the dog, "sit!" the dog is going to sit, that we're going to teach them manners and things to do. Whereas cats we say, "Oh, it's just a cat and they get to do whatever they want," which is in some ways a good thing and in some ways not a good thing. And actually people don't really bother trying to train their cats, though that I think they often do a bit by accident, like they teach their cat to come and go when they open the cupboard where the treat packet lives, for example, so they can learn things. And we know that they can learn things, but most people don't bother to try and train their cats. So I think it's the same with, the amount of attention that we pay to them. Cats don't get as much attention paid to them as dogs either and that's to the detriment of the cat.
HZ: Elsie the cat appears to think about the humans around her enough to provoke some of my social anxieties. She has buttons with the names of the humans she is around regularly -
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: And if she does not have a name button for you, she will give you a nickname.
HZ: I would be worried about what nickname a cat might give me. What if it was Stinky litter box or something?
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: And I have a friend that she calls “dog”.
HZ: Dogs are great, that's alright.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: “Loud dog.”
HZ: Yeah I'm not going to assume that's a compliment; my earlier apprehension about cat-selected nicknames stands.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: So my nephew, Eli - this was one of my favorite encounters: she was calling him Mouse which I think was because he was small and quiet. And, then she she asked, She basically asked for his name. She's like, “what stranger scritches?” and Eli had been petting her, so I recorded a button for "Eli" and she, kind of immediately said, “hi, Eli.” And like, we both were like, "Gasp!" I think Eli was less blown away by it than I was because he didn't see the progression. He was just like, "Oh yeah, my aunt's cat just talks."
HZ: “It's easy."
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: “It's easy, you know, it's no problem.” But it was so fast. And then the really interesting thing is that she will sometimes use name buttons, like "bug" was a nickname that she gave to one of the foster kittens, or she was just calling all of the foster kittens "bug", I don't know, because they were small and fast and annoying is my guess. But there was one that we named Bug. And we've got this new foster cat, Todd, and when she saw him, she said, “Bug.” And I was like, "No, different cat." And then later, she said, "Play, Big Bug". And, I was like, “Oh, okay. Yeah, if you want to go play with Big Bug, that's… Good job. Yes.”
HZ: She seems like a very logical cat.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: She seems like it. I mean, she is still a cat. Like, let's be super clear.
ZAZIE TODD: Cats know their own names. They might know the names of other cats in the same household. In some households, they seem to know the names of some of the people in the house. So that comes from research where they played the sound of someone's name or the cat's name, and they had a picture to show the cat. We can't tell what the cat is thinking or what a dog is thinking, but there is a research method that's been used with babies to see what they think of things, and basically they can use how much looking time the infant would spend looking at a screen if the sound matches the thing that they're looking at a picture of or not. So you can use the same principle with cats and dogs, so you can see how long they will spend looking at the screen.
For example, there was a recent study with cats that tried to teach them new words. They just had two words, made-up words; this was done in Japan, so made-up Japanese words, and each word corresponded to a different picture that was shown on the screen to the cat. And they taught the cat that word, and then, to see if they actually knew it, they then swapped them around, so they said one of the words with the other picture that went with the other word, to see how long the cat would look, so that you can use the looking time of the cat, it tells you that the cat is thinking, "This isn't right, that word means a different picture." So that's pretty clever.
HZ: Yes. That’s incredible.
ZAZIE TODD: Yeah, so I think our dogs and cats deserve more credit than we tend to give them. They probably understand quite a lot, even though it's very hard for us to know exactly what they do understand.
HZ: Have you tried teaching any of your other cats and your dog to use the buttons?
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Mm hmm.
HZ: How did that go?
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: We have successfully taught Guppy, our dog, to use buttons. But she is very much a what you see is what you get kind of dog. Elsie will have conversations often with multiple word constructions, phrases, and Guppy's conversations are more like, “Outside, outside, outside, outside, outside!” Or my personal favourite was, “Friend, friend, friend, friend, friend, friend, friend, here!”
HZ: Aww.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Yeah, good job, good job.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: That’s what I imagine a dog's internal monologue to be like 90 percent of the time.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Yeah, so it's like, you know, “I wonder what my dog is thinking?” Exactly what you think your dog is thinking.
HZ: What, to you, are the differences in how dogs and cats respond to human language?
ZAZIE TODD: I think dogs have a lot more experience of being expected to respond to human language. When we're training dogs, of course, we often teach them by gestures first, so if you're teaching them to do specific behaviours, often you would use, like, a hand gesture, or you might lure them into position and then turn it into a hand gesture and then use the words. So they have a long history of paying attention to us, and being expected to pay attention to us, because important things will happen to them. Whereas I think we don't talk to cats as much, we certainly don't expect them very much to do the things that we say to them, but I'm sure they're always listening.
And for cats and dogs we tend to use what we call pet-directed speech very often when we're talking to them. So that would be with the higher pitch and often using easier phrases. It's kind of like infant-directed speech. It's a kind of simpler language when we're talking specifically to our pet. And I think they like that. There's some evidence they like that. If scientists play that kind of speech through a speaker, they orient to the speaker. to the speaker and they will spend more time near it compared to if they play other kinds of speech, so we know that they like pet directed speech. Whether it helps them to learn any of the language that we say to them is an open question, we don't know; but in infants it's assumed that that kind of way that we speak to infants does actually help them to learn language, so who knows, maybe it helps pets pick something up too.
HZ: Yes, because I was thinking, why am I drawn to going [high-pitched gruff voice] “Who's a good boy? Who's a good boy?” like that? But if it's helping, then I feel vindicated.
ZAZIE TODD: Yes, it's because your dog likes it, and they will come and pay attention to you and look at you and perhaps lean on you or ask for pets or whatever. And the same with your cat. If you do this to your cat, they will often respond well to it too.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: And the speculation is that the higher pitch, the repetition, the cadences make it easier to identify when words start and end and make it easier for them to understand what you're saying to them.
HZ: Just like humans do, our companion animals are interpreting a variety of cues from how we’re communicating with them.
ZAZIE TODD: There's the meaning of the words that we use. There's our body language. There's the tone of language that we use. So for example, there is evidence that dogs can tell the difference between us being angry or happy. I think cats would be able to tell the same - I don't specifically know of research on that, but I haven't gone looking, so I can't promise it's not there. But for dogs, there is research on whether they can detect our own emotions and they can. So that would include things like our facial expression and so on. They do know when we're yelling at them and we're not happy with them.
For example, some of the research on dog training methods has shown that when people are yelling at their dog it's the same as other aversive methods like tugs on the leash and shot collars and prong collars in that it seems to have adverse effects for the dogs. So they can be stressed. They know when they're being yelled out basically, and it's not to be recommended - and actually it's quite a common question I get asked: what tone of voice should you use when you're talking to your pet? So if you're asking your dog to do something, we do recommend that you don't yell at them, obviously, because they don't like it; but you can just use a neutral tone if you're asking them to do something, like just to say, "sit," don't yell, "sit!" for example, if you're asking them to sit, because they notice. So I think they do pay attention to the tone of voice that we're using.
HZ: And it does affect them. Anxiety is very common among dogs.
ZAZIE TODD: Yeah, I was quite shocked when I was writing my book Bark, because one of the figures from some of the studies is that almost three quarters of dogs have some kind of fear or anxiety, which is quite worrying and distressing.
HZ: Zazie mentioned that there has been a lot more research into dogs' interaction with human language than there has been with cats. Such as the Genius Dog Challenge project, which has been going for several years already.
ZAZIE TODD: The Genius Dog Project is a project that's being done by researchers in Hungary: they are testing dogs who know a lot of words. So dogs who know the names of I think it's 28 different objects are able to take part in this study. So they are investigating what they know and how easy it is to teach them new words, and they've also done research where they've had dogs who already know quite a few words, and other dogs and tried to teach them lots of new words. And most dogs are not able to learn the names of lots of toys, but some are - most of them being border collies, but not all of them being border collies.
HZ: The most genius dog.
ZAZIE TODD: Yeah, border collies are special kinds of dogs but they've been bred to work closely with people, so it makes sense that that kind of dog would be better at this. But it doesn't mean that all border collies can learn lots of words.
HZ: Is there anything that's come out of that study so far that you've been like, "Hmm! Interesting!"
ZAZIE TODD: I think the main thing is just that once dogs are able to start learning words, these particular dogs can keep on learning lots of words for things. So I think that's just amazing, that some dogs can learn the names of lots and lots of different objects. It's very, very clever. My dog does not know the names of lots of toys, he is definitely not a genius, but I love him all the same. He's a shih tzu and he's a senior, so he would never take part in that kind of study, also because it involves fetching the toys and that would be too much effort.
HZ: Yeah, someone else will do it if you leave it long enough.
ZAZIE TODD: Absolutely.
HZ: If you were really being so smart, genius dogs… Of course, there are other ways domesticated animal friends communicate with humans without human language being involved.
ZAZIE TODD: I think it's important to mention about cats’ meows. The cat's meows are kind of special to the relationship they have with their person. As in, every cat has their own meow. Cats typically don't meow at other adult cats. It's a way that they have learned to communicate with us. And if you play people recordings of their cat meowing in different circumstances, like they want food or they're separated from the owner and want to find them, that person can tell pretty much what their cat wants. If you play those meows to someone else, like a different cat person, they can't tell very well what they mean. So it's like, it's very individual, which I think is really interesting and I think it's really nice that it shows that that relationship between you and your cat is actually very special and the cat sees it that way, like they've got this special way of communicating with you.
HZ: I think people will find that very validating.
ZAZIE TODD: Yeah. Especially given all the stereotypes about cats. I think it's nice for people to know that cats have developed ways to communicate with us. It does show that they care about us, you know, that our relationship with them matters and that they are trying to communicate with us.
HZ: Right, and they’re not just here to get fed.
ZAZIE TODD: Yeah, which is the stereotype. Of course they like their food, but they like us too.
HZ: Do you find her a more demanding feline friend now that you know? What she's asking for?
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: This is a yes and a no. It has gotten rid of a lot of the bad behaviours. She was one of those cats who would climb furniture that she was absolutely not supposed to climb. She knew it would get our attention. And she would grab your ankle - kick, bite, not to the point of drawing blood, but to the point of, it hurt and it was annoying - when she was frustrated, and it really turns out that most of it was that she was frustrated because she wasn't being understood, because she wanted the interaction. I always thought that she was hungry and wanted kibble all time, and while it is true that she loves her kibble, most of what she was actually asking for was interaction, and the kibble was the form of interaction we were giving her. So, no, she's less demanding now because we can negotiate. And yes, she's more demanding now, because it's much harder to ignore someone who's speaking English. Even though she, she does not actually speak English. The buttons say English words. But they are harder to ignore. But I can also negotiate with her. I can tell her, “no, later”. I can tell her, "Mary Robinette working" and have this negotiation.
ELSIE: Phone. Scared.
HZ: Oh, I'm sorry.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Why scared? No - friend. [presses buttons] "Friend human". So "friend human" was me. And that's doing something called modeling.
ELSIE: Scared.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: I know.
ELSIE: Scared. Scared.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: I'm sorry.
HZ: How terrible did I feel to hear Elsie the cat say she was scared? Very terrible!
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: [presses buttons] Sorry. “Sorry” was me also. We're not training them. You have to train them to use the first couple of buttons, because it's an unnatural motion, and then after that, it's modeling in the same way you would model for a child where you say the word in a conjunction with something. And the fact that she can tell us that she is experiencing discomfort now: before we had buttons, she would probably have been under the bed for most of this. And now she' can say, “I don't like what's happening. I'm scared,” whichwas a word that I modeled in times where she was demonstrating that.
HZ: How do you model the difference between “friend” and “stranger”?
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: That one was easier in some ways, because anytime someone she didn't know came came over, I'd be like, “stranger, stranger here,” and just say the word “stranger”. And initially "friend" was people that she knew. like my brother and his wife don't have their own word buttons. They aren't here often enough, so they're just "friend". My dad also doesn't have enough interaction with her to have his own button, so he's just "friend". So "friend” was modeling it as this is someone that you're familiar with that will give you treats that will be nice to you.
I think one of the other things that I was not expecting when I started doing this, thinking about “friend” and “stranger”, is that in some ways, the abstract words like the social words have been easier to model than the concrete words like the inanimate nouns, which surprised the heck out of me. I was expecting all of the animate nouns to be the ones it's like, "Oh, I can hold this out and show it to you." she immediately started using all her emotion word buttons contextually correctly. The first two that I gave her were "mad" and "love you". Those, she seems to get and use contextually very, very fast and clearly. But the inanimate ones, she tries to turn them all into verbs. She will verb every noun you give her.
HZ: That annoys people, but that's a very, very ancient linguistic process.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Yeah. And you see her do that all the time. “Tube” can mean the tunnel, it can mean a container, or it can mean the action of going through something. That sense. One of the other ones that has a lot of, a lot of meaning is “puzzle”. Before I gave her the “where” button, she would use “puzzle” to ask a question about trying to find something.
HZ: It's a lot of deductive reasoning happening with how she's using language. Fascinating.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Yeah, it really is - which is why, when I get comments on videos where it's like, “oh, this cat is just walking across buttons randomly,” I'm like, no, I have a dog that does that. I kind of daily have moments where I'm like, okay, no, this is really a thing that's happening. Because, to be clear, there are also enormous periods of time where she will press a sequence, I'm like, I have no idea what you mean by this.
HZ: That's a riddle for you to spend the rest of your life working out.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Mm hmm, yep.
HZ: The way Elsie uses words is not necessarily how her human uses them, so her human has to figure out what Elsie is wanting to express.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Whatever attribute I think that they have is not necessarily the thing that she thinks is the most important attribute of them. She has the word for paper because we have wrapping paper that she likes to play with, and before I gave her the “paper” button, she was calling it "loud play." And the sound of paper would not have been the important thing for me. It's just interesting because as much as we are communicating, she's not human. We literally do not see the same spectrum of colour. She can hear things that I cannot hear.
HZ: And smell things, presumably.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: And smell things that I can't smell. And so the things that are important to her that she orients on are just wildly different sometimes, and sometimes you can figure it out, and other times you're like, "I have no idea. I don't know why this word means this thing to you." One of the words that I was just like, “whew!”: “feather”. Before she had the word for “bird”, she would look out the window and she would say "feather foods".
HZ: Oh, so she knew that feathers came from birds?
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: But how, right? I mean, she could see it, presumably. I had a peacock feather for her. And she has an allergy, so she has this very restricted diet, and so I found this freeze dried duck, but she started calling that "feather foods".
HZ: Wow.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Right. I was like, this is weird and coincidental and has to be. And I was talking to, a veterinarian and they were saying, "well, I mean, if she's had a feather that she can chew on, and she's had duck, even though those are not the same things, there's a protein in there that maybe there's something that she's tasting, it's not completely out of the question.” It's not supported in any way by science, by studies, but it's not in the range of impossible. But she may have also been like, because it's freeze dried, it's got a different texture and it's a little bit like the feathers. So, who knows?
HZ: I suppose some things you just resign yourself to the great mystery of feline brain. And also just any language use relies on shared references and things and then other things you’re like, “????”
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Yeah. This is the thing that happens, is that you will start running through a list of all of the possible connections that it can make, and the danger is, because humans are pattern seeking creatures, that we will pick a meaning that she doesn't intend. And we're like, "Oh, obviously my cat is a genius!" But it, it's a lot of them. times where it's super clear and other times where like, I have no idea.
HZ: I guess we've all got to be a bit patient about people not understanding what we're trying to say or what we want. It comes to us all.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: all. Yeah, very much so. Very much so.
ELSIE: More. Word.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: “More word”? Can you use different words, please? [Long silence] Nope!
I would say all the time, “Elsie, use your words.” And so instead of giving her a button that said button, I gave her one that said "word" and she will use it as a button as a placeholder for a word that she does not have. One of my favourite, very cat - this is an extremely sarcastic animal - in a situation like this where I couldn't understand her and I asked her to use more words and she went to the word button and just said, "word, word, word, word, word, word."
HZ: That's just such a teenage human thing to do.
ELSIE: Potty. Outside.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: No.
HZ: Do you want us to go outside?
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Oh, do you want to go outside - right, if I remember that “potty” means fast for you.
HZ: How did you learn that “potty” means fast in Cat?
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: The way I realized that was that she started using it, I'm like, "is that like weird?” It's a button that I added to the board because of Guppy, who is a dog. And what Elsie would see is Guppy would say "outside, outside, outside" and I'd be like, "No, you know, we just came back in from outside. No, we're not going to go play outside. No." And then she'd say "potty", I'm like, "okay, let's go," immediately. And so watching Elsie, the way she uses it, the placement, the context -
ELSIE: Hallway. Hallway.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: - it seems, I'm not a hundred percent, but it seems pretty clear that she is using it as a, "no, I mean it, please hurry up. Let's do this thing now." She doesn't know that Guppy is pooping outside.
HZ: I suppose not - unless they talk about it.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: I have told her that that potty is - "potty word is outside litter box", but…
So the pattern that you will see when you give a learner a new button - and this can be frustrating for people - is that they will often immediately start using it contextually correctly. And then they will start just combining it with completely random words and you're like, “Oh, the animal doesn't know what it means.” But what they're doing is they're trying to figure out, they're experimenting. They're trying to figure out, well, if I put these two words together, what does, what happens then? Okay, what does the monkey do with, with these two? And so they'll start experimenting and it's like you're creating a pidgin together where you will come to agreement that, “Oh, you know, hair tie, okay, this means you want me to throw something for you.”
HZ: Were you, at any point in the process, scared or apprehensive to know what your cat was really thinking?
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: No, because anyone who lives with cats know that they are very good at letting you know their feelings and opinions without any words at all. So, I was not worried. I hear people say that, like, ”I don't want to know what my cat will say about me.” I'm like, you know how your cat feels about you. This allows her to be more specific. She curses at me, which I don't enjoy.
HZ: When did you realize that she could curse?
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: I had done something, like I wasn't letting her have something that she wanted, I remember the moment She was standing on the button board and she was glaring at me and her ears were back and she was just going, "litter box, litter box, litter box." And I was like, there is zero ambiguity.
HZ: Are you tempted to give her any other swear buttons?
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: No. It's very frustrating actually in the AIC community, because there are people who give their animals swear buttons for for clicks and views. It's funny, sure, but I feel really sad for the animals because I'm like, if you spent a fraction of the time that you're spending teaching them to do this trick for social media views, to teach them to actually use the buttons, you could have this richer life with your learners. So I don't want to give her any more things than she has. When she's displeased, it's "rude" or "mad", “litter box”. She'll just call me “human”.
HZ: It's cold.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Right?
HZ: She's got a Mary Robinette button!
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: She does have a Mary Robinette button, but she'll just say human. Sometimes just like “human litter box”. So it's really cutting. “Swatting” - one of the other things so we gave her a “swatting” button because she was always going up to the other cats and swatting them. And so we would say like, “no swatting, no swatting,” and so we gave her a “swattin”g button so we could say that with the buttons. And sometimes when she's mad, she will announce that, she will look at you and be like, "swatting". And I'm like, I appreciate that you are using your words instead of actually doing that, but… whew!
HZ: I suppose she’s reminding you that she could claw your face off, if she wants. Does Elsie use the “sorry” button?
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: She does use the “sorry” button, and appears to use it contextually appropriately. For example is she had gotten on the counter and I hadn't wanted her to the counter. And I had, you know, yelled, was like, you know, “rude”, and got off the counter and she went over to the button board and said, "rude, sorry. " I was like, thank you. Again, things I never saw coming was my cat apologizing.
HZ: We’ll hear about so many more things Mary Robinette didn’t see coming, in the next episode. Like Elsie tells lies! And some talking dogs - and their humans - come to visit. We hear about the kinds of things you learn about what your animal friend is really thinking. And how going through this process with companion animals can influence your language use with other humans.
Today you heard from Mary Robinette Kowal, Zazie Todd and Elsie the cat.
Zazie Todd is an animal behaviour expert and author: her books include Wag, Purr, and her latest is Bark, the Science of Helping Your Anxious, Fearful or Reactive Dog. Find out more about her work at companionanimalpsychology.com.
Mary Robinette Kowal is a multi-award-winning writer, puppeteer, educator, cohost of the podcast Writing Excuses, and her newest novel The Martian Contingency is available to preorder; I also very much enjoyed her recent mystery The Spare Man, a cruise ship murder set in space. Find Mary Robinette and her work at maryrobinettekowal.com.
Elsie the cat is cat. She’s busy being cat.
How about more podcasts to pipe into your brain? I'm on a new episode of the pop culture podcast Pop This!, talking about the new memoir by Kelly Bishop, who played Emily Gilmore, one of the greatest performances on 21st century television; she was also Baby's mum in Dirty Dancing, and she originated the role of Sheila the coolest character in A Chorus Line. It’s a fun show, find Pop This! in your pod-finding places, and while you’re there, check out World Gone Wrong, which is another chatshow but a fictional one, dealing with such topics as should a ghost pay rent, can you get paid overtime when you’re trapped in a time loop, and why does dad know so much about body snatchers? It’s a sweet and funny escape into other people’s supernatural problems, so find World Gone Wrong and add it to your subscriptions.
And if you like this podcast, could you be so kind as to tell someone about it? That would be a real boon to me, and, hopefully, to the person upon whom you’ve bestowed this podgift.
If you prefer giving cash gifts, don’t let me stop you on your way to theallusionist.org/donate to become a member of the Allusioverse. In return you get behind the scenes info about every episode of the show, plus regular relaxing livestreams with me reading from my ever-expanding collection of dictionaries; and you get to join the very wholesome Allusioverse Discord community, where this week we’ve been talking about looms and leguminati - that’s a portmantNO I found this week - and together we enjoy watchalongs of such literary classics as A Room With A View, Carol, Cold Comfort Farm and… Hot Frosty. And of course your money helps keep this show going. So to achieve all that, go to theallusionist.org/donate.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
nomological, adjective: relating to or denoting natural laws which are neither logically necessary nor theoretically explicable, but just are so.
Try using ‘nomological’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. and Martin Austwick who also composed the music. Find his songs at palebirdmusic.com. Thanks to Erika Ensign, and to Scott Newman and Jenny Mills from On Air Festival - tickets are on sale now for their 2025 event, we had a delightful time at this year’s. And huge thanks to Mary Robinette Kowal and her family for their hospitality: Ken Harrison, Rob Kowal, Jamie and Steve Harrison, as well as Elsie, Guppy and Todd.
Our ad partner is Multitude. To sponsor this show or any of the others in the Multitude nest, get in touch with them at multitude.productions/ads.
Find @allusionistshow on Instagram, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads, YouTube, and if you’ve got anything to tell me about how you and your companion animal use human language, I’d love to hear about it. Which languages do you use? What surprises have you found? Can you get them to answer your emails?
And you can hear or read every episode, getmore information about the topics and the guests who talk about them, and see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, and keep track of the events that are coming up like the 10th birthday live show and the festive watchalongs of Carol and Hot Frosty and a special literary festive thing I’ll be doing in December - all of it is at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
