"Its." Ouch. Hit me square in the pet peeve.
You just hit
me square in the pet peeve---because if there was one thing I have in common with the late
William Safire, my pet peeve is the phrase "pet peeve."
One of these days, [I'm going to] buy a dog and name him Peeve, so I can introduce him to friends in the thrill
of indignation: "This is my pet, Peeve."After that wisecrack, and a sufficient volume of affirmative fan mail about it appearing in his "On Language"
columns, Safire came to reference, frequently and amusingly, "My pet, Peeve, an information retriever . . . "
(In his first anthology of selections from those columns, he thanked all the readers "who wrote to talk about
their pets---all named Peeve.")
Personally, I thought his funniest deployment of the idea was in an "On Language" column about airline language
and his lament that "the fine old verb 'debark'" had fallen into disuse. He ended the column thus: "Have to go now;
my pet, Peeve, is debarking."
