Mea Culpa: a painting in good taste – and nothing to do with a forklift truck

John Rentoul on words that sound the same but should be spelt differently in last week’s Independent

Claude Monet‘s ‘Waterloo Bridge, Gray Weather’ (Art Institute of Chicago/Scala)

In a review of an exhibition of paintings by Claude Monet, we said: “Each time he approaches the window the light has completely changed and his practiced brush and palate seize on it with a kind of majestically serene immediacy, as though he’s never seen the view before.”

In British English, the convention is that “practised”, derived from the verb, is spelt with an “s”.

More embarrassingly, what Monet practised with was his brush and “palette” – a palette being the flat board on which an artist lays and mixes paints. It is the Old French diminutive of pale, shovel, blade, from Latin pala. The palate is the roof of the mouth, from a different Latin word, palatum, a vault.

Fortunately, we managed to catch another spelling, of a third word that sounds the same, before this article about the culinary fashion for “hot honey” was published: “Banks argues that the dominance of these trends … are instrumental in laying the groundwork for more exotic ideas and experimentation becoming accessible for enquiring pallets.”

This time, we meant “palates”, because in olden times the roof of the mouth was thought to be where taste happened. “Pallet”, on the other hand, is related to “palette”; spelt this way it came to refer to the flat wooden blade used by potters for shaping clay. Its meaning shifted dramatically in the 1920s, however, when it was applied to the large wooden trays used by forklift trucks for moving loads, which is the main meaning of that spelling today.

(There is a fourth word, also spelt “pallet”, meaning mattress, from Anglo-French paillete, straw, or bundle of straw, from Latin palea, chaff, but three different common meanings for three words that sound the same but are spelt differently is probably quite enough for one language.)

Mighty despair: Ambiguity struck one of our reports of Phillip Schofield’s troubles. We said: “He said that without his family by his side, he may have taken his own life.” Thanks to Richard Thomas for reminding us that “may” is the present tense and open-ended, implying that The Independent did not know whether he had killed himself or not, and that we should have used “might”, the past tense and therefore referring to something that could have happened but did not.

Bad timing: There is nothing wrong with the journalistic device of using “as” to bolt together two parts of a headline, but we need to be careful. The other day we said: “Mother-of-five dies after suspected cosmetic procedure as two arrested.” That implies that the two things happened at the same time, which would have been a coincidence, or possibly the plot of a Columbo story where the detective moves in to make his arrests just too late.

I know we try to minimise punctuation in headlines, but it needed a colon or a dash: “Mother-of-five dies after suspected cosmetic procedure – two arrested.”

Outdoor floor: Language changes, but we should be slow to adopt new usages. In casual speech, “floor” and “ground” are often interchangeable, whereas floors used to be only indoors. We reported the case of a punch that sent a “great-grandfather crashing to the floor where he hit his head and was knocked unconscious” last weekend. From the rest of the article, it was obvious that this happened outside, and “ground” would therefore have been more in keeping with the serious tone required.

I’ll be there: Similarly, The Independent’s style is to avoid the formula common in US journalism of saying at the end of a report – in this case about the new editor of The Spectator – that we had “reached out” to Michael Gove for comment. We are not the Four Tops. We “contact” the subjects of our stories to give them a chance to have their say.

Oxford style: Finally, John Schluter reached out to me in praise of the punctuation of the opening sentence of a report of celebrities demanding the end of a scheme that implies that meat is free of cruelty: “Comedy writer Ricky Gervais, singers Moby and Bryan Adams, and actors Joanna Lumley, Miriam Margolyes and Sadie Frost have accused the RSPCA of ‘misleading the public’ with its scheme that endorses meat products.”

That is an Oxford comma (after Adams) followed by no Oxford comma (after Margolyes) in the same sentence, and a good example of precision in punctuation, allowing a complex sentence containing lists to be readily understood.

Hats off all round.