0044 (0)1273 732 888
Blog
60-second fix: palate, palette and pallet
Author : Cathy Dann
Posted : 24 / 12 / 11
Share this:
Do you know your palates from your palettes from your pallets? It’s a particularly important distinction if you work with food or wine – or, indeed, paints or wooden platforms.
Of course, it’s blinking typical of English to have three different spellings for one pronunciation. But that’s part of our dear language’s charm.
Take a look at the following observed-in-the-wild examples (which are, on reflection, a little skewed towards wine – make of that what you will) and see if you can spot what’s wrong.
According to the above, the world has gone mad – artists are painting with wine, children are developing their sense of colour based on food choice, and perfectly good wine (iceberg pure, no less) is being thrown at wooden crates. Corblimey.
Here are the definitions, in glorious clarity:
palate the roof of your mouth palette the scoop-shaped board that artists mix paint on pallet a flat platform that you transport goods on
palate the roof of your mouth
palette the scoop-shaped board that artists mix paint on
pallet a flat platform that you transport goods on
We hope your palate receives many good and tasty things as the festive season jingles upon us. Not so much your palette, or your pallet – they tend not to appreciate it.
More 60-second fixes:
Advice and tips (155)
Grammar (60)
Choose your words wisely (45)
Uncategorised (33)
Plain English (25)
Psychology and linguistics (24)
60-second fix (21)
Language abuse (21)
Reader-centred writing (17)
Punctuation (15)
Online and social media (15)
Technology (15)
Spellings (12)
News from Emphasis (12)
Jargon (12)
Report writing (10)
Presentations and speeches (10)
International issues (10)
Technical writing (9)
Design and formatting (9)
Courses for companies (8)
Graduates (6)
Podcast (6)
Numbers and finance (6)
Letters and CVs (6)
Customer relations (6)
Quizzes (5)
Videos (5)
Literacy and education (5)
Development of English (4)
Proofreading (4)
Style guide (4)
Advertising (4)
Legal writing (4)
Twitter (4)
Partners (3)
MCA (3)
Artificial intelligence (3)
Email (3)
Writing news stories (3)
Wordplay (2)
PDF downloads (2)
Conferences and exhibitions (2)
Pitches and proposals (2)
Team leaders and managers (2)
Editing (2)
FAQ (2)
Tutorial (1)
Internal communication (1)
Policies and procedures (1)
Learning and development (1)
webinars (1)
Writing for media (1)
Book reviews (1)
More topics