palindrome recognisable without it. Australian respondents to the 1998–2000 Langscape survey, showed that pal(a)eo- is on the turn with 51% voting for paleolithic. palette, pallette, palate or pallet All these words are diminutive forms of the Latin word pala “spade”. That flat shape becomes the palette on which artists mix their colors, and as pallette it was the name for a particular plate of metal in the armpit of a medieval suit of armor. As pallet it was the name for a tool used by the potter to smooth the clay being worked on the wheel. In modern industries the same spelling (pallet) is the one used for the wooden platform on which goods are stored before transportation. Note that the spelling pallet is also attached to a quite unrelated word for a mattress of straw, derived from the French word for straw paille. And palate, though pronounced in exactly the same way as all the others, is also an unrelated word from Latin palatum. Apart from their likeness in sound, palette and palate can almost overlap in meaning when each is figuratively extended. The image of the artist’s palette is sometimes extended to mean “range of colors”, while palate is quite often a substitute for “taste”, based on the old idea that the taste buds were in the roof of the mouth. So either palette or palate might be used in an impressionistic comment about the rich tones of a new musical composition. It depends on whether the writer is thinking of the color or the flavor of the music. palindrome A palindrome is a word or string of them which can be read either forwards or backwards with the same meaning. Words which are palindromes include noon, madam, and the South Australian placename Glenelg. Longer examples include: don’t nod! (injunction to bored audience) revolt lover! (goodbye to romance and all that) step on no pets! (warning as you enter premises of an incorrigible cat breeder) red rum sir is murder (I’d settle for a red-label beer) Few palindromes get put to a serious purpose. The only possible exception is a man, a plan, a canal, Panama! used, as it were, to hail the work of Goethals, the US army engineer who completed the canal’s construction in 1914, after decades of setbacks. Those addicted to palindromes are also conscious of the next best thing—words or phrases which can be read both ways but with a different meaning each way, such as: dam/mad devil/lived regal/lager stressed/desserts There is no standard name for them, though one addict has proposed semordnilap for reasons which will be apparent. 591 pallette pallet, palette or palate pallette, pallet, palette or palate See palette. pan- This Greek element meaning “all” is embedded in words such as: panacea pandemic pandemonium panegyric panorama pantechnicon pantheist The literal meaning of the prefix is not so easy to isolate in such words, however. It’s a good deal more noticeable in modern English formations such as Pan-American for a US airline, and in international institutions such as the Pan-Pacific Congress. pandit or pundit See pundit. paneled or panelled The choice between these is discussed at -l/-ll panic For the spelling of this word when it becomes a verb, see -c/-ck papaya, papaw or pawpaw See pawpaw. Papua New Guinea Both culturally and linguistically Papua and New Guinea are separate entities, and they were managed by different colonial powers until the end of World War I. In the nineteenth century, Papua was administered by Britain, and New Guinea by Germany. However Papua was ceded to Australia in 1905, and New Guinea became Australia’s mandated territory by resolution of the League of Nations after World War I. Australia has since then administered the two together, and they were forged into a single unit through independence in 1972, with the double-barreled name. The name is strategic, giving careful recognition and equal status to both Papua and New Guinea. There is no hyphen between the two names. Citizens refer to themselves in full as Papua New Guineans, though those from Papua have been known to describe themselves as just Papuans. Fortunately the whole nation is united by the use of a common lingua franca: tok pisin (also known as New Guinea pidgin or Neo-Melanesian). In it Papua New Guinea is called Niugini, a neat and distinctive title. (For more about New Guinea pidgin, see pidgins.) Note that as a geographical term, New Guinea refers to the whole island, and therefore includes not only Papua New Guinea, but also West Irian, or Irian Jaya— once a Dutch territory, but now part of Indonesia. papyrus For the plural of this word, see -us section 1. para- These letters represent three different prefixes, one Greek, one derived from Latin and a third which has evolved in modern English. The first, meaning “alongside or beyond” is derived from Greek loanwords such as paradox, parallel, paraphrase and parasite. Fresh uses of it are mostly found in English scholarly words such as: paraesthesia paralanguage paramnesia paraplegic parapsychology parataxis 592 paradigm Note that before a word beginning with a, the prefix becomes just par The second prefix involving the letters para- comes to us through French loanwords such as parachute and parasol. They embody an Italian prefix meaning “against”, a development of the Latin imperative para literally “be prepared”. But parachute itself is the source of the third meaning for para-, found in recent formations such as the following: parabrake paradrop paraglider paramilitary paratrooper All such words imply the use of the parachute in their operation. Note that the word paramedic may involve either the first or the third use of para. When referring to the medical personnel who provide auxiliary services besides those of doctors and nurses, it belongs with the first set of scholarly words above. But when it’s a doctor or medical orderly in the US armed forces, who parachutes in to wherever help is needed, the word is clearly one of the third group. parable A parable uses a simple story to teach a moral truth. The word has strong biblical associations, as the word applied in New Testament Greek to the didactic stories of Jesus Christ. But the definition applies equally to Aesop’s fables. A parable differs from an allegory in that the latter is concerned with more than a single issue, and often involves systematic linking of the characters and events with actual history. See further under allegory. paradigm This word is widely used to mean “model”, though its older use is in terms of a “model of thinking”, an abstract pattern of ideas endorsed by particular societies or groups within them. The term applies to the medieval assumption that the sun revolved around the earth, which was replaced by the opposite cosmological paradigm—that the earth revolves around the sun. Sociologists use the phrase dominant paradigm to refer to a system of social values which seems to set the pace for everyone. Rebels try to expose it with the slogan subvert the dominant paradigm. Paradigm is also a synonym for the word “model” in a different sense, that of “exemplar” or just “example”. These meanings have always been part of the scope of the word in English, so the following usage is nothing new: The new guidelines are a paradigm for nonsexist communication in any large organisation. Some people resist this use of the word, and it fuels their conviction that the phrase paradigm case is a tautology. But even that phrase is fully recognised in the Oxford Dictionary (1989). The word paradigm haslongbeenusedin grammars to referto the set of different word forms used in the declension or conjugation of a particular word. The often- quoted paradigm for the present tense of the Latin verb amare “love” is: 593 paradise amo “I love” amas “you love” (singular) amat “he/she/it loves” amamus “we love” amatis “you love” (plural) amant “they love” For a given context you select the form of the word you need. This idea of selecting one out of a vertical set of options has been extended in modern linguistics to refer to the alternative words or phrases which might be selected at a given point in a sentence. See for example the various paradigms in: Several new staff begin on Monday. A few employees commence next Monday. A number of assistants start next week. The use of paradigm in this last sense is the basis on which linguists speak of the paradigmatic axis of language, as opposed to the syntagmatic axis. For more about the latter, see under syntax. paradise When things are so good it seems like heaven, there are plenty of adjectives to express the feeling. In fact there’s a confusion of choice: paradisiac paradisian paradisal paradisiacal paradisaic paradisean paradisial paradisaical paradisic Though the major dictionaries give separate entries to several of these, it’s clear from their crossreferencing that for almost all of them the preferred spelling/form is paradisiacal. paragraphs For those who cast a casual eye down the page, paragraphs are just the visual units that divide up a piece of writing. The paragraph breaks promise relief from being continuously bombarded with information. The start of each paragraph is still marked by an indent in most kinds of writing and print publishing. But in electronic publishing and business correspondence the trend is to set even the first line of each paragraph out at the left hand margin (= “blocked format”: see further under indents, letter writing and Appendix VII). For the reader, paragraphs should correlate with units of thought or action in the writing. They should provide digestible blocks of information or narrative, by which the reader can cumulatively absorb the whole. Ideally (at least in informative and argumentative writing) the paragraphs begin with a topic sentence, which signals in general terms whatever the paragraph is to focus on. The following paragraph shows the relationship between topic sentence and the rest: In Sydney it’s commonly said—and perhaps believed—that Melbourne is a wetter place. The facts are quite different. Sydney’s rainfall in an average year is 594 paragraphs almost twice that of Melbourne, and in a bad year, a lot more than that. Suburban flooding is a much more frequent problem in Sydney than in Melbourne . . . The first sentence says what the paragraph is about, the notion that Melbourne is a wetter place (than Sydney). Note that the second brief sentence in fact combines with it to show what the paragraph is intended to do, and also works as a kind of topic sentence. Following the statement of the topic, there are specific points to back it up, and so the paragraph forms a tightly knit unit around a particular idea. Readers (especially busy ones) are grateful to writers who provide regular topic sentences. And for writers it’s a good habit to get into, because it obliges you to identify the topic of each paragraph, and reduces the tendency to shift on to other matters which really deserve a separate paragraph. It makes writers much more conscious of the structure of their argument. 1 How long should a paragraph be? What is considered normal in length varies with the context. Many newspapers use one-sentence paragraphs in their ordinary reporting—presumably because they are conscious of the visual effect of longer ones, and are less concerned about giving their readers information in significant units. In scholarly writing and in institutional reports, paragraphs are often quite long—as if shorter ones might imply only cursory attention to an issue. For general purposes, paragraphs from 3 to 8 sentences long are a suitable size for developing discussion, and some publishers recommend an upper limit of 5/6 sentences. Paragraphs which threaten to last the whole page certainly need scrutiny, to see whether the focus has actually shifted and a new paragraph is needed. 2 Continuity of paragraphs. Paragraphs need to be in an appropriate order for developing the subject matter. The connections between them can then be made unobtrusively—often embedded in the topic sentence. In the following example, a small but sufficient link with what’s gone before is provided by means of the word different: A different approach to marketing fiction paperbacks might be to develop automatic vending machines for them, to be installed at airports and on railway platforms The use of different is a reminder to the reader that at least one other “approach” has already been discussed, and a sign that a contrasting strategy is coming up. The one word achieves two kinds of cohesion with what went before. (For a range of other cohesive devices, see under coherence or cohesion, and conjunctions.) Some people advocate including a cohesive or transitional device at the end of each paragraph, as well as at the beginning. This can become very tedious if done 595 parakeet, parrakeet or paroquet in every paragraph, and is not necessary if there is adequate cohesion at the start of the paragraph. parakeet, parrakeet or paroquet These are only some of the spellings for this colorful native bird. Others recorded are parroket, parroquet, paraquet and paraquito. The origin of the word is much debated: French, Italian and Spanish ancestors have been found for it, each contributing to the variety of the spellings. In English the spelling parakeet is the one preferred in many dictionaries, including the Macquarie Dictionary(2005) and the Oxford Dictionary (1989).Webster’s (1986) gave preference to parrakeet. The spelling with double r suggests the influence of parrot on it. Both parrot and par(r)akeet seem to owe their origin to the name Peter, in French and Spanish respectively, though the details of their etymologies are still elusive. parallel This word is well endowed with ls, and so the final l is not normally doubled when suffixes of any kind are added to it. Hence paralleled and paralleling; and parallelism and parallelogram. Yet the spellings parallelled and parallelling appear as alternatives in some dictionaries, and they make the word conform to the standard British rule for words ending in l (see under -l/-ll-). It makes the third syllable rather hefty however, and even Fowler (1926) preferred to make an exception of parallel, and recommended against using double l with it. Citations in the Oxford Dictionary (1989) show that the spellings with four ls have been very little used. parallel constructions Presenting comparable or contrasting thoughts in a parallel construction is an effective way of drawing attention to their likeness or otherwise. Many ordinary observations become memorable sayings or aphorisms with the help of parallelism: Least said soonest mended. Run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. The use of identical grammatical structures in the two parts of those sayings helps to bind them together into an effective package. In the same way a writer can use a parallel construction to draw attention to ideas which complement or contrast with each other. See for example: The traveller doesn’t need to go outside Australasia for sightseeing, or to see the best, get the best or do the best this planet affords (G.D. Meudell) The grammatical structures of the three points in the latter part of the sentence are matched exactly—so exactly that all of them can be read in connection with the final clause. In the following example, the lack of exact matching makes it difficult to read things in parallel. It shows faulty parallelism: The speaker was not able to hold their attention, nor his jokes to amuse them. 596 parasitic or parasitical The need for a plural verb in the second statement means that the reader cannot borrow the singular one from the first statement, and the parallelism fails. The benefits of parallelism are easily compromised by noncorrespondence of the two parts, and what results is stylistically worse than if there had been no suggestion of parallelism there at all. A simple change or two is often all that it takes to secure the parallelism: The speaker was unable to hold their attention, or to amuse them with his jokes. Parallel constructions can themselves be given extra emphasis through the use of paired conjunctions, such as neither . . . nor, either . . . or (when they express alternative ideas); and with notonly butalso or both . . . and when one idea is added to another. See further under those headings. paralyse or paralyze See under -yse. paranoid or paranoiac Both serve as adjectives to describe someone suffering from paranoia, both in the clinical sense of a severe mental disturbance, or in the ordinary senseof an anxiety that makes someone hypersensitiveor suspicious. Psychiatrists prefer to keep paranoiac for the clinical meaning, and to allow the general public touse paranoid for theordinary meaning. This distinctionis reflected in some dictionaries, but not consistently observed in common usage. paraphrase A paraphrase finds an alternative way of saying something. Dr Samuel Johnson did it impromptu when he first said (of a literary work): It has not wit enough to keep it sweet. and immediately afterwards turned it into: It has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction. In that famous case, the paraphrase has also effected a style change, from plain Anglo-Saxon language to rather formal latinate language. The stylistic change could of course go in the opposite direction—further down the scale of informality: . . . not enough spark to keep it lively. People use paraphrases for any of a number of reasons. A style may need adapting to communicate with a different audience from the one originally addressed. So a technical document may need extensive paraphrasing for the lay reader. A piece which is written for silent reading may need to be revised for a listening audience. Paraphrasing is also a useful way to test your understanding of anything you’ve read. Note that the best paraphrases work with whole sentences and ideas, and are not produced by finding new words for the slots in an old sentence. The example quoted from Johnson above is rather limited in this respect. By totally recasting the sentence you achieve a more consistent style, and more idiomatic English. parasitic or parasitical See under -ic/ical. 597 parataxis parataxis This is an another term for coordination. See under clauses section 2 (compound sentences). parcel For the spelling of this word when verb suffixes are added to it, see -l/-ll parentheses In the US this is the standard name for brackets, and Australians too are using it increasingly for that purpose. See brackets 1a. parenthesis This is a string of words interpolated into a sentence but grammatically independent of it: The old woman had managed (heaven knows how) to move the cupboard in front of the door. The brackets (parentheses) show the independence of the parenthetical comment, though a pair of dashes would also have served the purpose. Paired commas are sometimes used, butthey are not ideal: they implya closer interrelationship between parenthesis and the host sentence than there actually is. For other punctuation associated with parentheses, see under brackets. Because a parenthesis interrupts the reading of the host sentence, it should not be too long, nor introduce tangential material which could and should be kept for its own sentence. In examples like the one above, the parenthesis is brief and simply adds in an authorial comment on the main point. parenthetic or parenthetical See under -ic/-ical. parliament The pronunciation of this word confounds its spelling, which has been quite variable even up to a century ago. In earlier times the second syllable was spelled with e, y or i. The standard spelling comes from Anglo-Latin parliamentum (with the Middle English parli written into the Latin root parla-). The Anglo-Latin spelling began to be recorded in English documents from the fifteenth century, and became the regular spelling in the seventeenth. parlor or parlour See under -or/-our. parody A parody is a humorous or satirical imitation of a literary work (or any work of art). It usually keeps the form and style of the original work, or the genre to which it belongs, and applies them to rather different subject matter. In the example below, Dorothea Mackellar’s romantic poem about the Australian landscape is turned into a satire on the more primitive aspects of suburbia. Mackellar’s original version appears on the left, and the parody by Oscar Krahnvohl on the right: 598 participles I love a sunburnt country I love a sunburnt country A land of sweeping plains A land of open drains Of rugged mountain ranges Mid-urban sprawl expanded Of droughts and flooding rains. For cost-accounting gains I love her far horizons Broad, busy bulldozed acres I love her jewelled sea Once wastes of fern and trees Her beauty and her terror Now rapidly enriching The wide brown land for me. Investors overseas. Those who know the words of the original will find strong satire of its romanticism in the parody. Those who only half remember it will still notice the parodic effect of using a carefully worked poetic form to express uncompromising social criticism. paronomasia This is a learned word for punning. See further under puns. parrakeet or parakeet See parakeet. parricide or patricide While patricide is strictly “murder of one’s father”, parricide is “murder of a parent or ancestor, or any person to whom reverence is due”. The Latin word pater is clearly the formative root behind patricide, and is sometimes claimed for parricide as well. Another possibility is that parricide embodies the same root as the word parent. The modern spelling with two rs disguises this, though in Latin the word was often spelled with just a single r. The connection with parent is made more likely by the fact that in Roman law par(r)icidium was regularly defined in terms of the killing of father or mother. pars pro toto This Latin phrase, literally “part for the whole”, is an alternative name for meronymy or synecdoche. See further under synecdoche. participles The following show the various forms: present: rolling taking blowing ringing past: rolled taken blown rung The names present and past are misnomers, since either participle can occur in what is technically a present or past tense. In we were rolling the present participle combines to form the past continuous tense, and in we have rolled the past participle contributes to the present perfect. What the participles really do in English is create different aspects for the verb, either imperfect, also known as continuous,orperfect, i.e. completed. (See further under aspect.) The participles also contribute to the active/passive distinction, in that the present participle is always active, and the past one is normally passive (see further under those headings.) 599 particles The two kinds of participle are frequently used as adjectives in English, as in a rolling stone and a rolled cigarette. Each type is also capable of introducing a nonfinite clause, witness their role in the following sentences: Rolling towards them the tyre loomed larger every second. They found the papers rolled up in a cardboard tube. See further under nonfinite clauses. particles The term particle has been used to label various kinds of words which are difficult to classify among the standard grammatical parts of speech (see under that heading). It is often applied to the adverb-cum-preposition which is attached to simple English verbs, and becomes integral to their meaning, as with take up, write off and many more. (See further under phrasal verbs.) It also serves to refer to the much censured “preposition” which can occur at the end of a sentence (see prepositions, section 2). partly or partially These can certainly serve as synonyms for each other in some contexts. Yet there are also distinctions to be made, if we agree with Fowler (1926) that partly seems to target the fact that only some part(s) of the whole are concerned, whereas partially implies that it’s a question of degree over the whole. So a partly finished report would be one of which some sections were done and others hardly begun, and a partially finished report is one which has been fully drafted, but which needs polishing overall. You might also note that in examples like those, partly seems to comment on the noun report (only part of the report is done), while partially modifies the verbal adjective finished, showing the extent to which it is finished. Those distinctions are fine ones to make, and in many contexts it may not make much difference. Note however that partially is stylistically more formal, and grammatically less flexible than partly. Partially works like a standard adverb, modifying verbs,adjectives and other adverbs;whereas partly can beused to modify whole phrases, as in: It’s partly because of his unfailing interest her fault to please my family on behalf of my wife In all such constructions partially is impossible. Webster’s English Usage (1989) notes that this may become the most important distinction between the two words. Be that as it may, the additional uses of partly already help to give it much greater currency than partially. parts of speech This is a traditional term for what are now usually called word classes. Either waythey are the groupsinto which words maybe classified, according 600 [...]... though the e final acute accent lingers to distinguish it from the English word pate “head”, as in bald pate pathos In the ancient art of rhetoric, this connoted an appeal to the audience’s sense of pity and using it to sway them Pathos contrasted with ethos, the attempt to impress the audience through the intrinsic dignity and high moral stance of your presentation Neither pathos (nor ethos) is to be... indicates who actually signed the letter, as opposed to the person in whose name it is sent The usual convention is for p.p and the proxy’s initials or signature to appear just above the typed signature of the official sender An older convention reported by Fowler (1926) and others since is for the proxy also to handwrite the official signatory’s name, either before the p.p or after their own initials So a... recognised as the more direct method, and meant trying to engage the audience’s sympathies with something that touched the heart, or appealed to their better instincts (see further under pathos) Nowadays we might feel that the appeal to emotion was sometimes aimed at some instinct lower down the body—gut feeling, or the hip-pocket nerve Both then and now, the persuader also knew the power of appealing to self-interest,... derive from the same source, the Latin adjective planus “flat or level” The different spellings became attached to their different uses in the seventeenth century The spelling plane became the one for mathematical and technical nouns, including the vertical plane, the (aero)plane, and the plane used to smooth wood in carpentry The same word serves as an adjective in plane geometry The other spelling... tense Most English verbs show whether the action they refer to happened in the past, rather than the present or some indefinite time in the future This is the point of difference between: live/lived send/sent teach/taught write/wrote The past tense is often shown simply by the -(e)d suffix, as with lived and all regular verbs Irregular verbs make the past tense in other ways, with changes to vowels and/or... words In the Australian ACE corpus overall, the % sign occurs just about as often as the paraphrase It is always set solid with the preceding number: 70% When used in tables, it need not be used with every number in a column of percentage figures, but can simply appear at the top of the column (Note that the figures in the column may not add up to exactly 100 percent, and the total at the bottom should... ravioli, spirelli, tortellini, vermicelli etc The English word pastry embodies the same root, and with the -ry suffix transforms the cereal substance into the medium out of which shapely pies and pie crusts can be created The traditional English pasty features both the pastry medium, and its meaty ˆ e filling, whereas in paste and pat´ the meaning has shifted away from the cereal to ˆ e the prepared meat... Britain, the same fuel is gasoline or gas in the US ph or f See f/ph phalanx This word enjoys some general use, meaning a body of people in close array Its plural then is phalanxes, just as in historical references to the distinctive battle formation used by the Greeks and Macedonians (men packed together under overlapping shields) But for the anatomist who uses the word to mean any of the bones of the. .. out of town, or in another city pigmy or pygmy See pygmy pimento or pimiento These both go back to the Spanish word for pepper, but they are now attached to quite different fruits Pimiento is the sweet and pungently flavored red pepper, the fruit of a shrub (Capsicum annuum) which is also picked and eaten green Alternative names for it are the bell pepper, sweet pepper and capsicum Pimento is the spice... express the agent of a passive verb, but only as a phrase after it: The subjects were tested by the doctor for HIV antibodies Even in this form, the passive seems to downplay the agent, not allowing it to take up the more prominent position at the start of the sentence (see further under information focus) 2 Style and the passive Because passive verbs play down the agent (or make it invisible), they are . tested by the doctor for HIV antibodies. Even in this form, the passive seems to downplay the agent, not allowing it to take up the more prominent position at the start of the sentence (see further. passed. past tense Most English verbs show whether the action they refer to happened in the past, rather than the present or some indefinite time in the future. This is the point of difference. percentage figures, but can simply appear at the top of the column. (Note that the figures in the column may not add up to exactly 100 percent, and the total at the bottom should be left as 99.4% or 100.2%,