R Pale in significance

OASTING the palaeolithic diet last week made me wonder about palaeographers, palaeontologists and other pale creatures.

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, when you put “palaeo-” in front of a word, it means “primitive”. Palaeo- comes from the Greek palaios, which means “ancient” and it is related to palin, which means “backwards”.

Try telling that to Noakes’s okes around the braai. Or Michael Palin, for that matter.

The word “pale” is neither backwards nor primitive. As an adjective, it comes from the Old French paile — “light-coloured” — but this is not the sort of pale Meryl Streep was talking about in the film adaptation of John Fowles’s book The French Lieutenant’s Woman .

With a black cloak billowing around her white face, Streep lamented: “I have set myself beyond the pale. I am nothing. I am hardly human any more.”

Some might have thought this a heart-rending plea for a darker shade of foundation (unlike that favoured by the band Procol Harum), but what the ghostly Streep meant by “beyond the pale” was that she had done things so bad that she was no longer within reach of any sort of decency or redemption.

This kind of pale, from the Latin palus, was first used as an English noun in the 1300s. It described a pointed stick stuck into the ground. Stick a whole lot of sticks into the ground close to each other and you have a fence.

In times gone by, “the pale” was what the English called the fence separating territories they ruled in foreign places, specifically France and Ireland, from the barbarians on the other side. To go beyond this boundary was both naughty and dangerous. You ran the risk of being clubbed by a Frenchman with a baguette, or being offered a cup of whiskey by an Irishman.

If the DA erected a fence around the Western Cape, then climbed over it in search of more territory, you might be able to say that they had gone beyond the pale. You might say that. I couldn’t possibly comment.

“Paling” can also mean turning beige in terror, but paling fences are not those whitewashed by Tom Sawyer. They are the ancestors of the dreadful palisade fences that blight our urban landscapes today. Painting them green does not make them any less hideous.

Paling and palisade both come from pale, as does impale, which is what a fence does to someone who sits on it. One shudders to think what might have happened to Jill’s friend Jack had he tumbled down the hill onto a fence around a Joburg park. Who builds a well on top of a hill, anyway?

But back to pale. I have been wondering whether the erroneous “beyond the pail”, which I have seen in print more than once, might be Jack’s fault. Perhaps readers of nursery rhymes thought that by dropping his pail and rolling far away from it, Jack had crossed over to the dark side and would be punished.

If pale were spelt pail, it might mean that Tonto and the Lone Ranger were not quite as close as we like to think they were. No loyal comrade would call his friend a bucket-face, surely.

The wonderful Grammarphobia blog quotes language writer Michael Quinion on the confusion between pale and pail. “Beyond the pail?” he asked bemusedly. “Isn’t that where you go when you kick the bucket?” LS