This week I have a quick and dirty tip about the difference between a mantle spelled

TLE and a mantle spelled TEL, an immediate middle about how to format bulleted lists,

including zombie examples.

First mantle or mantle though.

Stay on Twitter for International Podcasts Day.

I joked that people should celebrate by hanging garlands of earbuds from the mantle.

But I used the wrong spelling of mantle.

It's so embarrassing.

So I made up a memory track to help myself and you remember the difference.

A mantle that ends in TLE is a cloak.

It's also the spelling you want when you talk about passing the mantle of power.

Think of a king or queen passing that red royal robe onto a successor.

The mantle of darkness, as in cloaked in darkness, and the earth's rocky shell layer between

the crust and the core.

A mantle that ends in TEL is the shelf above your fireplace.

In the house where I grew up, the mantle was brick, but they can be stone or a big wooden

beam or something else.

Both wards have the same origin, but they evolved to have these different meanings.

Maybe early on someone thought that the shelf above the fireplace wrapped around it like

a cloak.

Regardless you can remember the correct spelling by thinking of a telephone sitting on your

fireplace mantle.

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