Rowing and canoeing

The twenty-first entry is la pale de la pagaie, and the short word in the middle of it is the one an English reader will misread without noticing anything at all. La pale is the flat surface that pushes against water or air: the blade of a paddle here, and just as readily the blade of a propeller, of a turbine, of a helicopter rotor. Nothing in it is washed out or short of colour. French keeps that sense in a separate word, pâle, and the circumflex carries the whole of the difference — un visage pâle beside la pale de l’aviron. The trap goes deeper than one accent, because « pale » in English is three words wearing a single spelling. It is the adjective. It is a pointed stake driven into the ground, which is why a fence built of them is « paling ». And from the ground such a fence once enclosed comes « beyond the pale », said of behaviour nobody will put up with. So read la pale as the working end of the paddle, and leave the colour, the stake and the boundary to the other three.