Palate, Palette, Pallet, Pellet

“Most of all he (Mr Leopold Bloom) liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.” —Ulysses by James Joyce

PALATE:

Palate is the roof of the mouth. Palate consists of hard palate (anterior bony portion) and muscular palate (posterior soft portion).

Palate means the sense of taste; having the ability to differentiate between different flavours, different dishes; the intricate differences between and among almost similar dishes; the ability to distinguish subtleties in foods. The parts of speech based on palate are palateless and palatelike (adjectives) Examples:

To be a wine taster, you need to have an outstanding palate.

PALATABLE: Palatable means acceptable, agreeable to the palate or to the taste, that which is savoury, figuratively refers to something that is agreeable or acceptable to the mind or feelings.

Who would like to hear unpalatable utterances?

CLEFT LIP & CLEFT PALATE:

Cleft lip and cleft palate are deformities by birth but rectifiable. Cleft palate or cleft lip is a congenital defect – a visible division or longitudinal fissure in the roof of the mouth.

PALETTE:

Palette is a board used by artists to mix colours, to mix paints or pigments, and a range of colours such as used by artists. Palette board can be oval or rectangular. Examples:

Palette is an essential toolkit of a painter.

Every painter has a palette – a range of quality, use of colours, tones and timbres.

What is the palate (tone and timbre) of the paintings of Michelangelo?

Watercolour artists use a palette of light colours marking out intricate distinctions with a colour of blue, white, grey, green and others.

An artist’s palette changes in using colours, in using themes with the passage of time.

PALLET:

Pallet is a platform usually made of wood to keep things, for storing articles or items, to move things from one place to another (on the pallet).

Pallet is the platform for moving things: cargo or freight.

Forklift truck is the truck that moves things placed on a pallet from one place to another.

Pallet is a metal tool used for storing cargo, moving freight, a potter’s tool that has a flat blade used for mixing the clay and shaping it, a lever with projections on a machine.

The obsolete meaning of a pallet is a bag made of coarse cloth or rough material into which straw was stuffed to use it as a mattress. Pallet is a small bed. Once upon a time, people in the countryside slept on pallets.

PELLET:

Pellet has many meaning: a small solid mass such as a packed ball of food, wax, medicine; a compressed matter; an imitation bullets used as toys; a small pill such as the one take by some patients or those on medication; in coins and ornaments, pellet is the raised area; and in zoology, pellet is the mass of undigested food such as the ones consumed by birds. Examples:

Because cows in urban India are grazing on plastic and foreign articles, they are excreting pellets of plastic.