Even More False Friends

Third in a series on words that are frequently confused or misused.

• Palate/Palette/Pallet: Palate is the roof of the mouth or, by extension, the sense of taste; it derives from Latin palatum. A palette is the board an artist uses to mix colors. You'll find a pallet in a warehouse: it's a large, flat, portable tray that's used with a forklift to move loads. Pallet and palette were once interchangeable (from Latin pala, a spade), but after their meanings diverged, around 1921, it became important to distinguish between them.
• Flesh/Flush: You flesh out an outline or an idea by adding "flesh" to its skeleton. You--perhaps accompanied by your faithful terrier--flush out a criminal from his lair or the birds from their nest. Flush out derives from the language of the hunt; it means "to frighten from cover" or "to drive out into the open." (For other meanings of flush--a very interesting word that can also mean "level," "to turn red," "in the money," and much more--see The Free Dictionary.)
• Horde/Hoard: Homophones with distinct derivations, these two words are frequently confused, as in this sentence from the San Francisco Chronicle: "In 'The Rape of Europa,' an Army doctor named Leonard Malamut, who was on hand when American soldiers discovered Hitler's vast horde of loot..." Horde comes from a Turkic word (urda in Tatar, ordu in Turkish) that means "army." Hoard comes from an Old English word meaning "treasure" or "vast store." True, both words signify aggregations, but one refers to people, the other to things. The Chronicle writer should have used hoard.
• Parlay/Parley: Spelled with two a's, the word means "to place a certain kind of bet" (the original wager plus its winnings) or "to maneuver to advantage." (It's what corp-speakers should be using instead of the verb to leverage.) It comes from paroli, a term in the card game faro. Parley, on the other hand, comes from French parler, "to talk." As a noun, it means "discussion" or "conference"; as a verb, it means "to discuss"--in particular, with an enemy.
• Foreword/Forward: The clue here is in -word. A foreword is a written passage--a series of words--that comes before the first chapter of a book. (An afterword appears, logically enough, afterward.) The suffix -ward indicates direction (as in toward or backward or windward). Forward means "near the beginning" (the forward part of a ship) or "advanced" (retailers love to talk about styles being "fashion forward"); as a verb it means "to advance" or "to send." In sports, a forward plays in the front line of offense. In general, be careful with fore- and for-; a forebear is an ancestor, whereas to forbear is to refrain from. Forego means "precede, come before"; forgo means "to relinquish." When in doubt, look it up.

Read False Friends the First.

Read False Friends the Second.

Comments

[Steve S]

Occasionally I wonder what I'd do without this blog. Great post, there are one or two in there that I have been a victim of.

[Abram]

I see far too many of these errors in print today. Wouldn't it be nice if there were regular newspaper columns devoted to this and related topics? Since many of our educational institutions, from primary school right through to university, no longer focus on teaching students to write well, posts such as this ought to be widely circulated. Please keep 'False Friends' coming.

[Ben]

Very cool. I followed a series of links and landed. Also small world, as in ex-Oaklander. Did I make that up? No probably plenty of Oaklanders around. Hard to remember whether you heard something before or not. I never thought about how complicated it could be to name things.

[Tim Hicks]

When you get to #4, please cover rein/reign. I suppose it is possible to for a powerful monarch to have free reign, but "free reign" is now used nearly all the time where "free rein" would be better. I guess it's because we all use horseless carriages now, harrumph.

[Denise]

What a great find this blog is and this post! I get SO tired of people misspelling and mispronouncing words. Reading this made my day.