Palate, Pallet, and Pallette
These three homophones are easy to mix up. Here are the differences and how you might remember them.Palate: The roof of one's mouth or, more metaphorically, one's culinary tastes. Notice that it ends with ate, which can remind you that it has to do with your mouth.
Palette: The set of colors an artist uses in a painting, or the piece of wood the artist holds those colors on. Some of the colors on an artists palette might be considered pale.
Pallet: A small wooden platform, a straw-filled mattress, or a temporary bed. The only mnemonic I know is the process of elimination. It isn't something you ate and it isn't necessarily pale, so it must be a pallet.
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| Bob Ross and his palette pallet. |
Prepositions, ending sentences with
If anyone still believes that it's wrong to end a sentence with a preposition, they probably don't read this blog. Or newspapers. Or good literature.Some have pointed, as a source of this non-rule, to Robert Lowth's A Short Introduction to the English Language, published in the mid-seventeenth century, and apparently popular enough to lead to multiple printings.
I admit that I haven't read the whole thing; I did some searches on the text in Google Books. The only bit I can find in this text that seems to back up the claim that Lowth was the progenitor of the preposition-as-non-sentence-ender "rule" is this, which begins with a quotation of Alexander Pope:
"The world is too well bred to shock authors with a truth, which generally their booksellers are the first that inform them of." This is an Idiom which our language is strongly inclined to; it prevails in common conversation, and suits very well with the familiar style in writing; but the placing of the Preposition before the Relative is more graceful, as well as more perspicuous; and agrees much better with the solemn and elevated style. (p. 141)*Lowth isn't wrong in his belief that this sentence could be made clearer with a little editorial tweaking. But this isn't exactly the bold statement, "Never end a sentence with a preposition," is it? It amounts to no more than stylistic advice; moving the preposition, he says, would crete a "more graceful" sentence, but doing so doesn't make the sentence more grammatical.
Note also how Lowth writes "which our language is strongly inclined to," with that to rescued from sentence-ending status only by the deft use of a semicolon.
More interesting, though, is that on the same page (141), just one paragraph earlier, Lowth writes this:
The Preposition is often separated from the Relative which it governs, and joined to the Verb at the end of the Sentence, or of some member of it: as, "Horace is an author, whom I am much delighted with."So not only did Lowth not create an editorial commandment against ending a sentence with a preposition, he included an example of when a sentence should end with a preposition.
So if the fake rule against ending a sentence really does spring from Lowth's book, it springs from a misreading of it. A preposition is a fine word to end a sentence with.
As long as it looks and sounds the way you want it to.
*Italics, capitalization, and punctuation for all quotations from A Short Introduction to the English Language appear as originally printed. I did, however, modernize the spelling, so that you read first, Preposition, and perspicuous instead of firft, Prepofition, and perfpicuous.