Pater vs Palter - What's the difference?
pater | palter |
To talk insincerely; to prevaricate or equivocate in speech or actions.
* Shakespeare
* Tennyson
* '>citation
* 2010 , Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles
To trifle.
* Beaumont and Fletcher
*1886 , , The Princess Casamassima .
*:He waited and waited, in the faith that Schinkel was dealing with them in his slow, categorical Teutonic way, and only objurgated the cabinetmaker for having in the first place paltered with his sacred trust. Why hadn't he come straight to him—whatever the mysterious document was—instead of talking it over with French featherheads?
* 1922 , (Virginia Woolf), , Vintage Classics, paperback edition, page 100
To haggle.
To babble; to chatter.
As a noun pater
is father.As a verb palter is
to talk insincerely; to prevaricate or equivocate in speech or actions.pater
English
Derived terms
* paternal * paternity * patricide * patrilineage * patrilineal * patrimony * pater familiasSee also
* mater * padre * patricianAnagrams
* ----palter
English
Alternative forms
* (l)Verb
(en verb)- Romans, that have spoke the word, / And will not palter .
- Who never sold the truth to serve the hour, / Nor paltered with eternal God for power.
- I would prevaricate and palter in my usual plausible way, but, this being Cambridge, such stratagems would cut no ice with my remorseless and (in my imagination) gleefully malicious interrogator, who would stare at me with gimlet eyes and say in a harsh voice that crackled with mocking laughter: ‘Excuse me, but do you even know who Lermontov is ?’
- Palter out your time in the penal statutes.
- Don't palter with the second rate.
- (Cotgrave)