patrol: [17] What is now a reasonably dignified term began life as a colloquialism meaning ‘paddle about in mud’. English acquired the word via German from French patrouiller, which originally denoted ‘tramp around through the mud of a military camp – when doing guard duty, for instance’. This was an alteration of Old French patouiller ‘walk or trample in mud’, a verb based on the noun patte ‘paw’.
Other English words which trace their history back to patte are patois [17] (which developed via the Old French verb patoier ‘trample on’, hence ‘treat roughly’, and originally meant ‘rough speech’) and patten ‘wooden shoe’ [14]. => patois, patten
