the.com/palate
the roof of your mouth moonlighting as a wine critic with delusions of expertise
means The roof of the mouth, or—more usefully—a person's sense of taste and their capacity to appreciate flavors.
from From Latin palatum, the roof of the mouth. The Romans, oddly enough, treated the palate as the seat of taste long before anyone understood the tongue's true role, so the word for that bony ceiling drifted naturally into meaning 'the faculty of taste' itself. It reached English through Old French in the medieval period, carrying both the literal anatomy and the figurative refinement we still hear when someone speaks of a 'discerning palate.'
- taste myth
- The tongue map is fiction; receptors cover everywhere
- trainable
- Sommeliers detect flavors most palates ignore entirely
- two meanings
- Names both mouth-roof anatomy and refined taste
- cleft origin
- Failure to fuse causes cleft palate at birth
- smell hijack
- Most flavor is actually your nose working
umami taste receptor — discovered 1908 by kikunae ikeda, the fifth basic taste on human tongue
hard palate — bony roof of mouth, separates oral cavity from nasal cavity in humans