The Final Touch

Not too many homo­phones trip me up, but one set con­sis­tently seems to.

Homo­phones? you ask.

Homo­phones are words that sound alike but are spelled dif­fer­ently and/or mean dif­fer­ent things. For exam­ple: to, too, two; or its, it’s; or all, awl. The list goes on and on. The one that has often sent me to the dic­tio­nary to double-check is this set: palate, pal­let, palette.

This morn­ing, over at Gram­mar Girl Mignon Fogarty’s “Quick & Dirty Tips” web­site, she offers some tricks to keep the three straight. Very helpful!

Palate can be remem­bered by its end­ing, –ate, because your palate is the roof of your mouth or your taste pref­er­ences. It has to do with food, so think of the past tense of “eat.”

It’s harder to come up with a good trick for pal­let, which refers to the plat­form goods are loaded and shipped on, or to a nar­row bed. Gram­mar Girl sug­gests think­ing of the two “l’s” in the mid­dle of the word as the edges of a nar­row bed. I like to think of them as two of the slats that run cross­wise to make one of those wooden ship­ping pallets.

And a palette is a set of col­ors a painter uses, or the board, often roughly oval-shaped, that holds those pud­dles of paint into which he/she dips the brush. Gram­mar Girl men­tions that –ette is a com­mon French word end­ing, and a lot of famous artists were French (Monet, Renoir, etc.).

I don’t think I’ll have to take time to look up these words again! If you have any good tricks that help you sort out homo­phones, please share in a com­ment below.

With this lovely shar­ing of the won­drous events of the first Christ­mas, I wish all of you a most blessed Holy Day!

What if the orig­i­nal Christ­mas events hap­pened today in the dig­i­tal age? How would we learn about it and tell oth­ers about it? Makes you think. Merry Christ­mas, everyone!

Love the mes­sage here — and in the spirit of the sea­son, I’ll for­give the miss­ing apos­tro­phes! But it’s just a good reminder that EVERYONE can use a proof­reader!! Merry Christ­mas from Final Touch Proof­read­ing & Editing!

I don’t know the origin/source of these — they were passed along to me via email — but I love them and wanted to share with all of you! May all your days be days of thanksgiving!

I’m in love with my almost-7-year-old’s brain. Seri­ously. My heart just swells when I think about how intel­li­gent he is. (Please under­stand, I’m not say­ing he’s more intel­li­gent than his brother or his class­mates or any other child; it’s not even so much a mom’s bias at work here as it is amaze­ment at the won­der that is the human brain cre­ated by God.) Yes, I am in love with that mys­te­ri­ous col­lec­tion of gray mat­ter between my lit­tle guy’s ears that makes him capa­ble of doing such things as work­ing his way through a pre­cise series of steps to cre­atively and resource­fully do what he has become fix­ated on doing.

That said, he has — as you might expect of some­one his age — a ways to go in the common-sense depart­ment. In other words, his highly capa­ble brain is some­times too capa­ble for his own good… or for mine. Read the rest of this entry »