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Last October, a member of the Aspies for Freedom web forum began a thread called "Post One Pet Hate Every Day." Other members began posting entries such as "Ignorant people," "one-button mouses," and "humans." Two weeks later, a member who hadn't contributed finally chimed in:

I avoided this thread for awhile because I thought it would be about hating pets....lol until I realized it was about pet peeves.

A few years earlier, in a forum for conspiracy theory enthusiasts, someone else asked fellow members, "What is your number 1 pet hate?" After "Elites secretly controlling the world" and "People who guarantee they know the truth and refuse to think they could indeed be wrong," there came this response:

Are we talking like Pet, as in Animal pets, hate?
If so, I hate that my dog chews everything and wants to kill small animals.
If we are talking about Pet Peeve "hate" then ... I hate people who don't care about what's going on around them

Both posters had to translate pet hate into pet peeve before they could get the intended meaning.

Sometimes this is taken to be a distinction between British English and American English. For example, a commenter on an online golf forum vented his "pet hate," and got the response, "Pet hate? In the US, we call it pet peeve." In its definition for the adjective pet, the Longman Dictionary Online has a single entry for pet hate and pet peeve, specifically labeling the former British English and the latter American. The truth, though, is a bit more complicated.

Let's start with the etymology of peeve itself. The Oxford English Dictionary has peeve the noun deriving from peeve the verb sometime around 1909, and peeve the verb arising via backformation from the adjective peevish, sometime near 1900. As for peevish, the OED speculates that it might ultimately derive from the Latin perversus, though there are gaps in the story.

It didn't take long for ordinary peeves to become pet peeves. Also according to the OED, the noun pet came from the Scottish Gaelic peata, meaning a tame animal. Its adjectival meaning of "cherished" or "favorite" is attested from 1819, in a quotation from Samuel Taylor Coleridge in a letter. The ironic extension of this meaning to encompass things that are especially disliked has its own subentry.

As for the difference between American and British English when it comes to pet peeves and pet hates, the new search tools on the Google Ngram Viewer allows us to run a comparison:

Looking at the blue and yellow lines, we can see that Americans do use pet peeve a lot more than they use pet hate. Looking at the green and red lines, we can also confirm that British speakers use pet hate more than they use pet peeve-but not by that much; it's about a 3-to-2 ratio. Furthermore, until the 1940s, pet hate was almost as popular as pet peeve in American English. There was even a song copyrighted in 1934 with the title "Pet Hate."

It also turns out that the earliest attestations so far for both pet peeve and pet hate are from American English. The OED has pet peeve from 1919, in a definition in a book of jargon: " Pet peeve, the thing that provokes you the most." That fact alone tells us that the origin goes back further, and Google Books yields a couple of slightly earlier examples, both from 1917, both from American publications.

One comes in the April issue of The Illinois Chemist, a publication of the University of Illinois's chemistry department. A margin-filling joke (like the kind you can still find in Reader's Digest) at the bottom of page 24 says, "Our pet peeve: 'Yes, and he talked about the paraffin series, methane, ethane, and profane.'" Get it? Pro pane? Pro fane? Those organic chemistry newbies are too much!

The other one comes from the September issue of Illustrated World, in an article by one Ray Goldman, explaining to prospective car buyers that a car costing less than $500 might not be such a bargain, because some conveniences you might think come standard don't-such as a speedometer and shock absorbers. Page three of the article states:

Now we come to the pet peeve of the small car owner. Very frequently when the machine has stopped because of traffic conditions and the policemen on guard, the car becomes stalled because it lacks a flexible motor. This compels the driver to step out and crank up the machine on a crowded thoroughfare, and you may be sure he doesn't like to do this any oftener than he has to.

The OED's first citation for pet hate comes in 1939, from the Baltimore Sun. This is about twenty years after the appearance of pet peeve, but again Google Books pushes the date further back. In fact, it takes it back to before the earliest attestation of pet peeve, all the way to 1902, again from an American publication. The novel Life of a Woman, by Richard Voorhees Risley, describes the elderly Miss Walsingham like this:

She had a huge sense of whimsicality and "intellectual fools," as she called them, were a pet hate of hers.

There's still more to the story. In addition to its citations for pet peeve and pet hate, the OED also has this 1880 quotation from Mark Twain's Tramp Abroad:

For years my pet aversion had been the cuckoo clock.

Once more, Google Books has an even earlier attestation, and this time it's from British English; specifically, the story "The Two Dolls" in Mary Russell Mitford's Our Village, published in parts between 1824 and 1832. The story concerns a little girl named Fanny Elvington, who had a "foolish and wicked prejudice":

But her favourite fear, her pet aversion, was a negro; especially a little black footboy who lived next door, and whom she never saw without shrinking and shuddering and turning pale.

Luckily, she sees the error of her ways by the end of the story.

Putting pet aversion into the Ngram mix with pet peeve and pet hate results in a surprising picture:

The peak for the red pet aversion line is more than twice as high as the 1945 peak for pet peeve, and almost twice as high as the current reading for pet peeve. It's only around 1950 that the frequency of pet peeve and pet hate combined approaches that of pet aversion, which by then has been in decline for more than twenty years.

And in while we're in the pursuit of bigger pictures, what did people call pet peeves, hates, and aversions before pet gained its ironic meaning? They called them bête noires and bugbears. Putting bête noire into the Ngram mix...

... it looks like they still do. Bugbear, it turns out, leaves all these synonyms in the dust, flattening the peaks for bête noire and every kind of pet dislike:

And finally, to close with the ultimate in closely nursed things that make your skin crawl, it turns out that there are even pet bête noires and pet bugbears!

Neal Whitman blogs at Literal-Minded, where he writes about linguistics in everyday life from the point of view of a husband and father. He taught English as a second language while earning his degree at Ohio State University; has published articles in Language, Journal of Linguistics, and other publications; and writes occasional scripts for the podcast "Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing."

Click here to read other articles by Neal Whitman

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Last October, a member of the Aspies for Freedom web forum began a thread called "Post One Pet Hate Every Day." Other members began posting entries such as "Ignorant people," "one-button mouses," and "humans."

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The world is not an equal place. Each person's experience is different with regards to human rights, opportunities, and quality of life.

Some countries have more resources and wealth than other countries.

Some countries have a peaceful, stable government, and others don't.

Some countries are naturally safe and some are dangerous, with lots of earthquakes or hurricanes.

Inequality can also exist within a single country. Some people are richer than other people. Some people live in areas with roads, hospitals, schools, while others don't.

Inequalities around the world can be linked to many causes. This is why there are many organisations that help populations in need. For example, UNICEF tries to help children around the world by providing resources in education and also health.

If the World Was 100 People
The world population is more than 7.7 billion people. This number is so huge that it is hard for us to imagine. So we are going to represent the 7.7 billion people as 100 people because that is a number we can all understand and work with. Now let's look at global inequality while imagining that there are just 100 people on the planet.

14 people have not learned how to read and write.

93 people do not have a college or university degree or diploma.

60 people do not have an internet connection.

22 people do not have a home (a house, an apartment, etc.) that protects them from wind and rain.

11 people do not have enough good, nutritious food to eat. This means that they are undernourished. 1 person (out of the 11) is dying from starvation.

9 people do not have access to clean, safe drinking water.

Here is a fun math activity for you to check your learning.
Find the correct percentage of people in the world for each question.
Watch the video below to see more examples of what a world of just 100 people would look like. Some of the numbers might be a bit different from the ones above, because the world is always changing.

In a world of just 100 people, 15 people do not have access to regular healthcare. Of those 15 people, 14 live their whole lives without ever visiting a doctor.

Watch the video below to learn more about why global inequality in healthcare is so important.

As you learned in the video, one of the best tools for keeping people healthy is vaccination, also called immunization.

For the next lessons we will look in more detail at immunization, especially childhood immunization.

All lessons & quizzes are free!

This was just one of the lessons in our Global Inequality section. There are over 200 lessons on Kids Boost Immunity just like this one on a variety of subjects. Each lesson includes a quiz, and every time a student scores 80% or higher on a quiz, we will donate life-saving vaccines to UNICEF Canada. Sign up now!
To see other sample lessons, click here.

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This is the grade 6-8 (ages 11-13) version of this lesson. There is also a grades 9+ version on the site. What is Global Inequality? The world is not an equal place. Each person's experience is different with regards to human rights, opportunities, and quality of life.