Brewer's: Pap

He gives pap with a hatchet. He does or says a kind thing in a very brusque and ungracious manner. The Spartan children were fed by the point of a sword, and the Teuton children with hatchets, or instruments so called- probably of the doll type. “Ursus,” in Victor Hugo's novel of “L'Homme qui Rit, ” gives “pap with a hatchet.”

Source: Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, E. Cobham Brewer, 1894
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