PALE

Wild Word Friday!

When I hear the word PALE I usually think of the color of my skin. But there is an older nearly obsolete meaning for the word PALE , which comes to the English language from the Latin word palus, a stake. A PALE was a pointed, narrow, upright piece of wood. Generally, PALEs were used to build fences.

In modern times, we have only a few instances in which PALE – the descendant of palus – remains in common use. The most familiar is in the word imPALE. The other use of PALE is in the phrase beyond the PALE, which we could loosely translate as meaning outside the safety of the fence.

A couple hundred years ago, specifically in 1791, Catherine the Great created the PALE of Settlement in western Russia, an area where Jews were allowed to live. Today, when we say that someone is living beyond the PALE, we mean that that person is not living within the accepted boundaries of our society.

(Please don’t misinterpret my example of Catherine’s PALE of Settlement. It’s a subject that hurts my heart. My maternal grandmother was of Eastern European Jewish ethnicity.)

Obviously, PALES and fences have been around for a long time. Where I live, many people put up “snow fences” in late fall to help prevent drifts of snow clogging their driveways and walks.

Do you have a fence? Decorative or for a specific use?

Blessings!

Sue

(Some information from WEBSTER’S NEW WORLD DICTIONARY OF THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE and THE CHRONOLOGY OF WORDS AND PHRASES by Linda and Roger Flavell. Photo from Wikipedia.)