A Bed “Pallet” Comes from French “Paillet,” a Word Tied to Straw

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Melanie. I’m calling from San Antonio, Texas.

Hello, Melanie. Welcome to the show.

What can we do for you?

Awesome. I have a question about a pretty common word, but my family has always used it in a different way.

It’s the word palette. I’m honestly not sure how they would spell it, but they use it to mean just a bed of blankets on the floor.

They’re both Southern. My mom grew up in Indiana and Arkansas. My dad grew up in Dallas and Houston.

And they both blew up using it and I used it in Florida.

But when I moved to Southern California, no one had heard of it at all.

I live in San Antonio now and no one knows it.

They look at me like I’m crazy.

So a pallet came up in your life when and how?

It was, well, I’d always used it throughout my life just to say, oh, we’re having a sleepover, like let’s make a pallet.

Yes.

But then I read it once in a short story in college.

I wish I had written down the author or something.

It was a Southern short story because they said the slave slept on a pallet.

I assume it’s the same.

Mark Twain used it in Huck Finn, so you may have encountered it there.

It’s not a short story, but that is very Southern, and there are slaves in that book.

My experience is the same as yours.

I encountered pallet when the cousins would come over, and we would put a bunch of blankets and pillows together on the floor.

We’d make a pallet, or we’d go over to Grandma’s house, who didn’t really have enough room for everyone.

There’d be the kind of family get-togethers, and I kid you not, where somehow I would be assigned to sleep under the table, under the feet of the adults who are playing cards and drinking above me.

So it was a kind of weird palate on the floor.

And it is very Southern.

It’s Southern, but it’s also what you might call the Southern Midwest, what they call the West Midland.

So in Missouri, where I’m originally from, it’s very well-known in parts of the state.

You find bits and pieces here in Illinois and Indiana and Ohio, but mostly it’s the Southern states and a little sprinkling here and there.

The origin of the term is different than the other palettes that you might, like a painter’s palette.

It goes back to a French word meaning straw.

So if you think of P-A-I-L-L-E, so if you think of a pile of straw on the floor as a place to make a bed.

That actually makes sense.

I think the short story I read even said it was like a straw palette.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

So we’ve kind of moved away from, we don’t have straw in the households much anymore.

No. And I bet a lot of the Southerners probably picked it up from the Bible because there’s this story in the book of John about Jesus and an invalid who is brought to him and he can’t walk.

And Jesus says, pick up your pallet and walk after he heals him. The guy picks it up.

Well, I’m a Peter star. I don’t know that. I have not read the Bible. That’s probably why I didn’t know that.

How would we spell it, though, in the sense that we use it? Would it be P-A-L-L-E-T?

Yeah, exactly. P-A-L-L-E-T.

And that ET is the kind of the suffix that means to make small or to make cute.

Like you might have, we add E-T-T-E sometimes on a thing to say it’s a factette.

It’s a tiny little cute fact instead of a big fact, right?

So it’s the same ET.

Yeah, like in Spanish.

Very good. Yeah, exactly the same.

How about that?

So you’re not alone and there’s millions of people who use this and they’re all nodding their heads right now going, yeah, she’s right.

Thank you, because everyone in Texas, I’m like, you’re in Texas. You should know this.

All right.

Thanks for calling.

Call us again sometime, Melanie.

Awesome.

Thank you so much.

You guys have a good one.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.