¹ Pet lamb is glossed in 1674-91 ‘a cade lamb’. As for the word cade itself, the explanation by way of Fr. cadel, attested by Cotgrave in the meaning ‘a castling, a starveling, one that hath need much of cockering and pampering’, has been rejected by the NED on the basis of Paul Meyer's statement that the form cadel cannot be authentic for French (Lat. catellus would give only chaël), but only for Provençal. But Meyer was not aware of the existence of OFr. chadeler ‘to direct, govern’ (from the quite different VL word *capitellāre, with -p'd- > -t-; cf. Lat. sapidus > OFr. sade), attested in the Roland and found in Cot-grave (with the meaning ‘to pamper’ and in an obviously Normandian form cadeler; cf. FEW s.v. capitellum), and indeed still found in modern French dialects (ibid.). On the basis of a cadeler ‘to pamper’, a cadel ‘one that hath need ... of ... pampering’ has been coined as a back-formation. The semantic development of cadeler is parallel, according to FEW, to that of It. governare ‘to direct’ > ‘to feed (animals)‘. There is then no reason why cade lamb should not go back to a *cadel-lamb. It must be assumed that pet lamb (attested 1674-91) took the place of cade lamb, the adjectival use of pet echoing that of cade.

[The term cade ‘pet lamb’ (also used as a call to sheep) is still current throughout Rhode Island, as well as in isolated communities in southeastern Connecticut and on Cape Cod. See Linguistic atlas of New England, Map 202.—BB]

² He further suggests a relationship with Fr. petit. Although it would be tempting to assume a back-formation petty > pet in Scottish English, after the peculiarly Scottish pattern seen in Davie: Dave, this connection must be discarded. English petty has a stylistic ring quite different from that of the more popular pet: it belongs to the semantic areas of administrative and legal language (petty officer, treason, larceny), of plant names (petti-chaps, petty cotton), or French cuisine (pettitoes < Fr. petite oie; the NED's doubts are unfounded), and of fashions (petticoat).

³ The two stems have sometimes coalesced in popular consciousness. Thus Martellière in his Glossaire vendômois translates péter ‘piétiner, remuer s'agiter—Les chevaux pètent dans l'écurie, c'est-à-dire donnent des coups de pieds'. The idea ‘kick of a horse’ predominates also in Fr. pétarrade—in spite of the fact that these words originally referred to the ‘peditum’ of horses as signs of restlessness.

⁴ One may also consider that for Rabelais the analogy between a healthy new-born child and a ‘peditum’ was given by the proverbial phrase glorieux comme un pet (attested by Gottschalk, Die sprichwörtlichen Redensarten der frz. Spr. 155, for the 15th century). Mistral, s.v. pet, explains the phrase very cleverly: ‘On dit en français “glorieux comme un pet”, qui chante dès qu'il est né.‘

In the edition of Lyons 1537 (text J according to the Lefranc edition) we find, after mon coíllon, mon peton, the words mon voisson. In this noun, which means ‘fitch, polecat (Putorius foetidus)'—the malodorous animal par excellence, the etymology from vesser (< Lat. vissīre) is still alive. Cf. the coupling of the same two stems pet- and vess- in a burlesque text of 1644 listed by Littré s.v. petaud: ‘Mouflarde, petaude, vessue, Retirezvous, le nez vous sue'; and cf. with Rabelais in the description of the island of the ‘estranges alliances’ (4.9) the passage: ‘vous avez peu de parens telz et tant proches comme sont ce ped et ceste vesse. Ils sortirent invisiblement tous deux ensemble d'un trou en un instant’. The addition of mon voisson testifies to the way in which mon peton was understood in Rabelais' time.

Surely Flaubert, whose inclination toward the scabreux that is likely to shock the bourgeois is well known, must have understood peton in the same way when, in a pastiche of Rabelais' style, he writes to Bouilhet (Correspondence 2.191): A Dieu, mon bon, adieu mon peton, adieu mon couillon (gausche).

⁵ To Pauli's remarks on cacophemic terms of endearment one should add the early Christian names, found by Giandomenico Serra in Christian inscriptions and documents, of the type of Sterculus, Merdulus, Cagatura, Porcella, Babosa, Tineolus. These must have been originally names of children retained by them as adults. See Göteborgs Högskolas Årsskrift 55.13.

^5a The Gallo-Romance names of the wren (roi pétaud, re petaret, petuzo; cf. REW s.v. pēdỹtum) must go back to the conception ‘small noisy bird’ (cf. la cour du roi Pétaud, la pétaudière, etc.); Sainéan, Les sources indigènes de l'étymologie fr. 3.32, translates roi pétaud gracefully as ‘roi petit pet'. It is not always easy to determine whether the name of a bird designated by a word of the péter family (cf. pet- formations on the maps of the Atlas linguistique de la France for fauvette, mésange, etc.) is due to a comparison of the particular cry of the bird with the noise implied in péter; cf. Baist on pétrel, ZRPh. 43.91, and Riegler on dialectal Italian bird names, Arch. rom. 7.8.

⁶ Surely the dialectal English pettle ‘to fondle, to occupy time over trifles’ (Wright) is formed in English from the verb pet, after fondle.

⁷ From the idea of ‘desire (manifested by the peditum)’ there develops in Spanish the meaning ‘to like': esto no me peta ‘no me place, agrada’ (Pequeño Larousse ilustrado erroneously connects this with Lat. appetere), Galician petar ‘tener voluntad para hacer algo’ (Alvarello). We must assume an antecedent impersonal construction *peta! = ‘cela pète!', said when something is to the speaker's liking. I suppose that the quite vulgar modern French expression ça me chante ‘cela me paraît agréable’ (attested by FEW as late as 1867) is nothing but a euphemism for *cela me pète (hitherto unattested), which is parallel to the Spanish expression.

⁸ The connotation of sulkiness (cf. the English dialectal meaning of to pet at ‘to scold in a fretful, peevish manner’, Wright) is extant also in French argot pet (pétage) ‘lawsuit’, péteur ‘plaintiff’ (Sainéan, Les sources de l'argot ancien 2.417), Rouchi pétée ‘vive réprimande’ (Hécart), and modern Fr. rouspéter, whose second part surely contains the verb péter. Our word family also occurs very frequently in French with the meaning (parallel to that of vesser and chier) ‘to flinch through fear’: Prov. petacho, petego ‘peur, frayeur, panique’, Savoie pëtëu ‘foireux, poltron’, Parisian (foutre le camp comme un) péteux ‘individu méprisable, poltron’ (Bauche).

⁹ Weekley thought Fr. prendre la chèvre to be parallel to take the pet (chèvre and pet both = animal), ‘though the metaphor is not clear’. What is common to the two phrases is only the secondary use of prendre, take. As for prendre la chèvre, E. Esnault, Métaphores occidentales 106, has very aptly explained the appearance of a goat in phrases meaning ‘to become furious’: the furious person shows a tendency to waggle his chin like that of a goat when it grazes. The original phrase was devenir chèvre ‘to become a goat’ = ‘to become furious’ (also chevroter), later varied by secondary verbs such as avoir, prendre, gober la chèvre. Surely this explanation is to be preferred to that of Partridge, who, in attempting to derive the American slang expression to get someone's goat from the French prendre la chèvre, would explain it as meaning ‘to take the milch-goat, often the poor man's sole source of milk’; but in French one never says prendre la chèvre de quelqu'un!

¹⁰ Though it must be said that linguists are in general still too prudish. Thus Meyer-Lübke (REW §6547) chooses to derive a Portuguese peta ‘lie’ (cf. petar ‘dizer pêtas, ser importuno’, petarola ‘grande pêta, mentira evidente; individuo trapaceiro, homem que diz muitas petas’, Figueiredo) from pỹtta ‘cake’ (which seems to be reflected in Ptg. peta ‘stain in the eye of a horse') by assuming a connecting link peta ‘*cake’ (unattested in Portuguese), on the basis of the German (!) expression Kuchen (ja Kuchen!) ‘fiddlesticks!’ —instead of simply connecting the Portuguese word with such French formations as Rouchi pétrole ‘mensonge, conte frivole, conte en l'air’ (Hécart), i.e. *pét-erolle ‘a tale that bursts or evaporates (pète) in thin air’. Cf. Prov. faire peta uno messorgo ‘lâcher un mensonge’ (Mistral); Catalan fer-la petar ‘charlar, tenir una llarga estona de conversa, una llarga enrahonada’ (Aguiló).