Fun with etymology: the word "pussy" in reference to genitalia comes, as you might guess, from the term used as a synonym for cat, which is a diminutive of "puss", a "call name", used to address a strange cat to try to beckon them over.
In short, "pussy" is an onomatopoeia for going "pspspspspsps".
What's amusing to me is that people started going "pspspsps" at cats by making noises and figuring out which ones got the attention and desired reaction from cats most often.
This is also how cats figure out what noises to make at people.
Domestic cats left to their own devices will age out of the "meow" vocalizations, which are infantile cries. But humans are better at hearing and discerning variations in these cries than we are with the range of adult cat communications (visual and auditory), and so cats learn to keep making them.
The domestic cat's vocal apparatus is far more sophisticated and complicated than it needs to be for baby cats to get the attention they need from their parents/carers (feral cat colonies trend towards communal parenting, as that's more successful), and overlaps with the vocal range of human babies.
If you've ever had a cat who sounds *distressingly* like a seriously upset human infant... it's a combination of natural selection and learned/conditioned behavior, because those are among the noises humans are worst at ignoring.
Knowing the huge range of vocalizations cats can make, if you have a young cat, it can be worth your while (though heartrending in the short term) to encourage them to communicate with screaming like a dying infant by ignoring them when they yowl horrendously and rewarding them when they don't.
One of our cats (Tony) is very vocal to the point of being conversational; one of her preferred forms of attention/enrichment is to play call-and-answer with one of us, where she "says something" and we reply. Even when she's voicing indignation or complaint, she's still pretty cute.
This is entirely just a thought that I keep because it amuses me, but if cat meows are their way of calling humans, and if ancient Egyptians named cats after their meows, then that means humans named cats the cat name for humans.
