pail / pale

[Ben Zimmer]

On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 12:27 PM, Charles C Doyle <cdoyle at uga.edu> wrote:
>
> When Congresman Ryan was quoted on the ABC website as saying that
> Cogressman Akin's comments were "over the pail," we should probably assume
> that the confusion of "pail" and "pale" was the mistake of the quoter, not
> the speaker?  Perhaps because Ryan said "over the pale" instead of the more
> common "beyond the pale"?

See Mark Liberman's analysis:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4139

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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