Cats have always aroused an extraordinary fascination. If today these little cats reign on the internet thanks to videos and memes, centuries ago their popularity was reflected in proverbs. Some expressions that have reached the present day without losing validity. “There’s a cat locked up here”; “take for a ride”; “find three feet to the cat”; “put the bell on the cat”; “take the cat into the water” are just a few examples that abound in the catalog of popular wisdom. One of the best known and used cat sayings is also one of the oldest. We are talking about the saying “At night, all cats are brown”. Let’s see what the expression means and where it comes from.
As a good saying, “at night, all cats are brown” is used correctly in most cases, even when the person who sings or writes it has not noticed the composition of the words that make up the phrase. And it is that, from the lexical point of view, brown is generally used to refer to the brown color of the earth or bear skin; however, in this saying brown means dark, as pointed out by the Cervantes Virtual Center.
The strictest and most literal meaning of the saying is that at night, in the absence of light, it becomes more difficult to distinguish things and people. Defects are hidden, giving rise to possible misunderstandings and deception. The phrase not only attends to the physical, but also to the intentions and instincts, which are equally camouflaged in the dark. It is a saying whose purpose is to warn of the risks involved in not having adequate visibility (or vision).
“At night, all cats are brown” is a very old saying. Experts agree that it was already a colloquial expression in the 17th century. Not surprisingly, the humanist and paremiologist Gonzalo Correas already included it in his Vocabulary of Proverbial Sayings and Phrases and Other Common Formulas of the Castilian Language (1627), albeit with a brief explanation of its meaning: “Because it is not seen”.
A little before Correas, Miguel de Cervantes already recorded the locution in the Second part of the ingenious knight Don Quixote de la Mancha (1615): “They make as good bread here as in France, and at night all the cats are brown, and Unfortunate enough is the person who has not had breakfast at two in the afternoon, and there is no stomach that is a span larger than another, which can be filled, as they say, with straw and hay”.
Although the exact origin of the saying of brown cats is unknown, a fairly widespread theory points to Madrid as a key place in its proliferation. As Alberto Buitrago points out in his Dictionary of sayings and set phrases. 5,000 different sayings and phrases and 3,000 variants of them, the saying has to do with the fact that the nickname of the people of Madrid is gatos, a name that at that time also meant thief. “The saying came to be used, surely from the 17th century, to warn those who went to the town and court not to frequent certain places at night, in view of the danger of being robbed”.
Thus, “At night all cats are brown” joins the list of traditional expressions, along with “the boondocks”, “be cooler than an eight” or “you take me down the street of bitterness”.
In the proverb there are other expressions that can be considered synonymous. We are talking about the sayings “At night, under sail, the donkey looks like a maiden” or “In the dark, everything is one”.
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