Answer: palate/palette/pallet
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fandom_grammarI have never lain upon a pallet considering the palette of the sunset sky while the taste of smoky coffee heated upon a campfire lingered on my palate, but if I did I could be confident that I used the right words to describe my experience.
Explanations lie under the cut, along with fannish examples from The Professionals.
My New Zealand Oxford Dictionary provides the following definitions:
Palate:
1. A structure closing the upper part of the mouth cavity in vertebrates
2. The sense of taste
3. A mental taste or inclination
The origin is from Middle English via the Latin word palatum.
Palette:
1. A thin board or slab or other surface, usually with a hole for the thumb, on which an artist lays and mixes colours
2. The range of colours used by an artist
The origin is the French diminutive of the word pale ‘shovel’, which comes from the Latin pala ‘spade’.
Pallet is where things can get even more confusing, because there are two distinct common meanings to the word with two distinct origins. First, from the usage at the beginning of my post:
1. A straw mattress
2. A mean or makeshift bed
The origin here tracks from Middle English to Anglo-French to the Old French paille meaning ‘straw’.
Pallet’s second meaning has the same origin as palette and its most familiar usage is:
A portable platform for storing and moving loads
However there are also other, less common usages of pallet sharing the palette origin:
1. A flat wooden blade with a handle used in ceramics to shape clay
2. An artist's palette
3. A projection transmitting motion from an escapement to a pendulum
4. A projection on a machine part to change the mode of a motion.
The similarity of spelling and the sheer number of usages means that there are many traps for the unwary. I still haven’t forgiven the local news website that presented me with an article describing ‘new decorating palates’. I had mental images of ornamented false teeth, or would I use them to stencil my walls?
How to avoid these pitfalls, since spell check has every chance of leading you astray?
Palate is hopefully easiest to remember, since it contains ‘ate’ with its association of taste and consumption.
For palette, with its obvious French derived spelling, perhaps associating the word with artists of a French persuasion might assist. And if I had to lie upon a pallet too often, I imagine that the experience would pall quite quickly.
If in doubt with a word, at least the internet is available to assist, and perhaps the fannish examples below will help as well.
Explanations lie under the cut, along with fannish examples from The Professionals.
My New Zealand Oxford Dictionary provides the following definitions:
Palate:
1. A structure closing the upper part of the mouth cavity in vertebrates
2. The sense of taste
3. A mental taste or inclination
The origin is from Middle English via the Latin word palatum.
Palette:
1. A thin board or slab or other surface, usually with a hole for the thumb, on which an artist lays and mixes colours
2. The range of colours used by an artist
The origin is the French diminutive of the word pale ‘shovel’, which comes from the Latin pala ‘spade’.
Pallet is where things can get even more confusing, because there are two distinct common meanings to the word with two distinct origins. First, from the usage at the beginning of my post:
1. A straw mattress
2. A mean or makeshift bed
The origin here tracks from Middle English to Anglo-French to the Old French paille meaning ‘straw’.
Pallet’s second meaning has the same origin as palette and its most familiar usage is:
A portable platform for storing and moving loads
However there are also other, less common usages of pallet sharing the palette origin:
1. A flat wooden blade with a handle used in ceramics to shape clay
2. An artist's palette
3. A projection transmitting motion from an escapement to a pendulum
4. A projection on a machine part to change the mode of a motion.
The similarity of spelling and the sheer number of usages means that there are many traps for the unwary. I still haven’t forgiven the local news website that presented me with an article describing ‘new decorating palates’. I had mental images of ornamented false teeth, or would I use them to stencil my walls?
How to avoid these pitfalls, since spell check has every chance of leading you astray?
Palate is hopefully easiest to remember, since it contains ‘ate’ with its association of taste and consumption.
For palette, with its obvious French derived spelling, perhaps associating the word with artists of a French persuasion might assist. And if I had to lie upon a pallet too often, I imagine that the experience would pall quite quickly.
If in doubt with a word, at least the internet is available to assist, and perhaps the fannish examples below will help as well.
Cowley took a slow breath as the fumes from the sip of good scotch filled his mouth from tongue to palate.
Bodie was annoyingly taken with Doyle’s brief art student experience. “No, seriously, Doyle, you’d have been very cute. A smock, a beret, your thumb hooked through your palette.”
Bodie’s mercenary experience served him well; the roughest pallet never bothered him. Give him a sleeping bag on a hard floor and he’d sleep like a baby.
Stuck mid-air with a terrified informant on a crane-suspended pallet, while Preston took pot-shots – it wasn’t one of Doyle’s better memories.
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17/2/14 20:21 (UTC)no subject
17/2/14 20:30 (UTC)Thank you - remembering ate for palate is a great help.
Thank goodness I don't often need to use any of them though - I'd be bound to take a stab and miss!