On people kittens as a name for human children…. My mother’s father, Raymond Seymour, was full blooded French. His parents were illegal immigrants… please don’t rat me out… on second thought, being exiled to France might not be that bad. At any rate, he grew up in a house in Biloxi, Mississippi where only French was spoken. He became fully fluent in English, though his parents never did. He died when I was small, but I remember his dropping French words into his English conversation. “I need my chapeau and my flambeau,” he’d say before going out at night to hunt flounder at the beach.
He loved babies, and would speak softly to them, calling them “minet” or, feminine, “minette.” He pronounced it “mee-neh.”
As an adult, I had a little trouble researching the meaning of this, because it is nonstandard French and hardly ever appears in French/English dictionaries or textbooks. It is essentially what we’d call “baby talk” in imitation of childish speech. As such, it means roughly “sweetie pie” or “my pet” or… “kitten.”
So, when he was cuddling his grandchildren, he was calling them, “my sweet kitties.”
On people kittens as a name for human children…. My mother’s father, Raymond Seymour, was full blooded French. His parents were illegal immigrants… please don’t rat me out… on second thought, being exiled to France might not be that bad. At any rate, he grew up in a house in Biloxi, Mississippi where only French was spoken. He became fully fluent in English, though his parents never did. He died when I was small, but I remember his dropping French words into his English conversation. “I need my chapeau and my flambeau,” he’d say before going out at night to hunt flounder at the beach.
He loved babies, and would speak softly to them, calling them “minet” or, feminine, “minette.” He pronounced it “mee-neh.”
As an adult, I had a little trouble researching the meaning of this, because it is nonstandard French and hardly ever appears in French/English dictionaries or textbooks. It is essentially what we’d call “baby talk” in imitation of childish speech. As such, it means roughly “sweetie pie” or “my pet” or… “kitten.”
So, when he was cuddling his grandchildren, he was calling them, “my sweet kitties.”