So cries Ruthie (in an old One Big Happy strip that came up in my comics feed this morning), objecting to what she saw as her mother’s accusation that she and her brother Joe were being like pets:
Here Ruthie shows an admirable appreciation of the English derivational suffix –y ‘relating to, like, resembling’, while betraying her ignorance of the adjective petty ‘of little importance’ (which is not pet + –y).
(Yes, this is today’s Pythonic MQoS posting; I am not dead yet.)
Lexical and morphological resources. The two relevant lexical items, from NOAD:
noun pet-1: [a] a domestic or tamed animal kept for companionship or pleasure: the pony was a family pet | [as modifier]: a pet cat. … ORIGIN early 16th century (as a noun; originally Scots and northern English): of unknown origin.
adj. petty: 1 [a] of little importance; trivial: both groups are known to fight over petty issues. … ORIGIN late Middle English (in the sense ‘small in size’): from a phonetic spelling of the pronunciation of French petit ‘small’.
And the relevant derivational affix, deriving adjectives from nouns, is the
suffix –y: doggy ‘like a dog’ (his doggy enthusiasm), catty ‘relating to cats’ (catty eyes), horsey ‘resembling a horse’ (horsey teeth), etc.
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