Cattywumpus
Crooked or Off Balance
By Daniel Muniz

At the end of my lunch break, I was driving back to work. My usual parking spaces at the back of the parking lot were taken so I had to park right up at the entrance to the building.

Although my employer never had any type of designated parking, it has always been customary that the front parking spaces belonged to the managers and project leaders. There always seemed to be a couple of empty spaces beside where the non-designated spots were but I had always avoided parking there whenever possible.

That day I pulled into one of those empty spots up front. I guess I was in a bit of a hurry and I when I got out of my truck, it became apparent that I did not park right but it was still good enough. Right at that moment, one of the affable project leaders that I work with had just parked in his non-designated spot. He had also stepped out of his truck at the same time too. He looked at my truck and muttered “cattywumpus.”

I chuckled.

I had never heard of that word before although since he was looking directly at my truck which was parked crooked in parking space, I just assumed that was what he meant.

Later that day, I asked him about that word. He said that it was just part of lingo from where he grew up at in Mississippi. He explained that Cattywumpus and other words were just commonplace from where he was from.

Amused, I decided to look it up.

I found nothing in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary or in any of the other popular web sites. I was able to find the word “cattycorner” and its variants in those dictionaries. Cattycorner, meaning diagonally across, which seemed to have the same origin got into the dictionary and into accepted usage. And I had heard “cattycorner” quite a few times.

I finally tracked down the word at the Urban Dictionary as well as in the other slang and redneck dictionaries. It is defined as:

1. Cattywumpus

Skewed or sideways to, out of alignment.
Bubba, you got that manifold gasket in there all cattywumpus.

At that, I decided to ask some of my acquaintances from around the country. Here are their responses:

Although I grew up in the barrio of a South Texas farming community as a kid and in the suburbs of a city as a teenager, I have been around rednecks all my life but that was probably the first time I had heard the word cattywumpus. Or at least I never remembered hearing it before.

The next day I finally had the opportunity to ask the first acquaintance if she had ever gotten a chance to use cattywumpus in a sentence. She said:

I said cattywumpus TWICE today!!

I don't remember exactly what the first one was about now, but the second was after [a friend] hung my pot rack. It was cattywumpus and I said so. I got a good laugh out of it, anyway.

My wife had heard of cattywumpus too although she had always been a suburbanite.

And one time I got a good chuckle out of it with her. While we were in the garage of our house, I told her that her SUV was cattywumpus. She laughed and told me that I was the one who parked it cattywumpus.

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