Mea Culpa: a splash of passion fruity on your palate

Words that sound alike, clichés and redundant adjectives from this week’s Independent

Palate-cleansing? Vote Leave campaigners get fruity (PA)

A charming homophone on Monday, pointed out to me by John Schluter, in this description of the workers at a toilet cleaner warehouse depot used for a Vote Leave event: “This was a group of people who, for the most part, move palates of Fruity Passion Splash about a warehouse all day.”

Funny word, pallet. It means a portable platform on which goods can be stored, usually made of wood these days and designed to be moved by a fork-lift truck. It comes from palette, French for little blade, which in English now means a range of colours, from an artist’s board for mixing paint. I suppose it used to be a little blade but became a larger one.

Pallet is surprisingly unrelated to pallet, meaning a straw mattress or makeshift bed, which comes from paille, French for straw. It is also unrelated to palate, the roof of the mouth, which has also come to mean taste.

That was, by chance, quite a good way to refer to a pallet loaded with Fruity Passion Splash, although it is a shower gel rather than anything edible.

Orwellian injunction: The phrase “one size fits all” is so over-used by politicians that journalists have no need to add to the sum of human irritation by using it themselves. A comment article about the break-up of Amber Heard and Johnny Depp on Monday used it twice. The “complexities” of domestic abuse, it said, are “seldom reducible to a one-size-fits-all analysis”.

Later, it said “the fairy tales that remain popular nowadays tend to be precisely the one-size-fits-all variety”.

In the first case, I think the point was that each relationship is different; and in the second – well, I am not sure what the point was, because the article went on to say that we like our fairy tales sanitised. I was too distracted by a metaphor taken from tights and baby clothes that makes no sense when applied to analyses or fairy stories.

George Orwell said: “Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print.” That is quite a stiff test for a writer, and probably too time-consuming in practice for a lot of journalism, but it is something to which we can all aspire.

Not to scale: A feature about pornography and prostitution on Wednesday discussed how the exchange of money makes it seem as if women take part willingly: “The sex trade manufactures consent; the result is commercial sexual exploitation on an industrial scale.”

This was a peculiar use of the cliché. The article had repeatedly described the sex trade as an “industry”, in which case it was obviously operating at an industrial scale. When the cliché was new, it worked because it contrasted something that wasn’t an industry, such as the creation of windy rhetoric, with a heavy manufacturing assembly line. Still, at least we didn’t write of an epidemic of commercial sexual exploitation.

Propassive writing: We reported on Thursday that Geena Davis is to produce a documentary about sex inequality in Hollywood. The project had been brought to her because of “all her proactive work in raising awareness of the problem”. How does proactive work differ from active work, or from just work?