Monday, September 3, 2007

palate/palette/pallet

Hey, guys! This is just a short little tip that I thought I'd share, so it's not really a full-fledged post.

I was just chatting with my friend on IM, and I was telling him that the Arizona green tea in the 1.24 Liter bottles is on sale at Safeway through Tuesday and that there is no limit on how many you can buy. I then told him that there are many pallets left at the Mililani location if he wants to buy tons like I did (I bought an entire box).

As I typed that, I thought, "How do you spell that, anyway? Is it pallettes? Palates?" So I did a google search for it and came upon one of my favorite sites, which is also listed under the References links on this Edit Hawaii blog: Brians' Common English Errors. According to Brians,

Your “palate” is the roof of your mouth, and by extension, your sense of taste. A “palette” is the flat board an artist mixes paint on (or by extension, a range of colors). A “pallet” is either a bed (now rare) or a flat platform onto which goods are loaded.

Has anyone else been feeling really paranoid / inadequate about their spelling, lately? Those quizzes were brutal. :P haha, man...

3 comments:

Pat said...

Good post, Jen.

Copyeditors need to be good spellers, but they don't need to be spelling-bee champions. They just need to be able to say to themselves, "Something about this word doesn't seem right. I think I'll look it up in my trusty dictionary…"

Later on, we'll be going over what happens when you make certain words possessive: e.g., Ramses', Joneses's, puppies'. And what happens when you make certain ones plural: SOSs, mothers-in-law, Rs, 1920s, doctors of philosophy.

As the weeks go by, copyediting rules will become more complex, so it's important for everyone to keep up. What you learn now will be built upon later, and if you don't keep up, you'll soon find yourself overwhelmed and confused.

I'm not trying to frighten people; I just want everyone to be prepared for the hard work ahead :)

Unknown said...

No really...

I've been feeling so insecure about my spelling. So much so that I drew a blank the other day while writing my friend a Myspace comment and trying to include the word "gnawing."

I couldn't, for the life of me, remember the spelling and made an effort to spell it by typing "knawing (sp?)."

Er. :p

Luckily, my friend's IQ hadn't dropped as many points as mine had and she helped a sistah out! :)

ceruleanjen said...

I'm glad I'm not the only one feeling the IQ-dropping vibe. haha