Eggcorn Forum

Note the odd spelling of “palliative,” an adjective that describes a form of terminal patient care:

Landrover discussion forum:: “It topped off a bad day as I was coming home after visiting my father in law in hospital and being told he really has to go into palletive care”

Profile on social networking site: “Love doing my work as a volunteer.My aim as a career,is to work in Palletive care”

Cancer support site: “As I mentioned previously mum was told by the consultant on Friday that they were no longer going to treat her cancer and everything now would be about palletive care.”

What would prompt nearly hundred writers on the web to insert “pallet” into “palliative?” To most speakers of modern English a pallet is a wooden platform on which goods are stacked. Hard to see a connection between this sense of “pallet” and palliative care.

An earlier and now almost defunct sense of “pallet,” however, has the word referring to a simple and portable bed (It derives from the Latin word for “straw,” the usual ticking for such beds.). This sense would give a better rationale for the substitution: a person in palliative care is usually confined to a bed. While this sense of the word “pallet” has drifted over the vocabulary horizon, a special group of English speakers still employs and understands the old word. In the late nineteenth century, when “pallet” still had some currency, it was used by the translators of the Revised Standard Version (RSV) of the Bible in two passages in which Jesus heals a paralytic as a proof of his authority:

Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise, take up your pallet and walk’? But that you may know that the Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins” – he said to the paralytic – “I say to you, rise, take up your pallet and go home.” (Mark 2:9-11, RSV)

Jesus said to him, “Rise, take up your pallet, and walk.” And at once the man was healed, and he took up his pallet and walked. Now that day was the sabbath. So the Jews said to the man who was cured, “It is the sabbath, it is not lawful for you to carry your pallet.” (John 5:9-10, RSV)

The RSV, the first English Bible to come close to matching the success of the venerable King James version, has induced a Bible-literate subset of the population to retain an old meaning of “pallet” that has largely disappeared from the vocabulary of most English speakers. I suggest that those who use “palletive care” for “palliative care” are hobbling along on the crutch of religious dialect and inserting a word for a bed into an appropriate (but mistaken) context.

Last edited by kem (2010-11-21 16:15:02)