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A recent article on the restoration of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris includes the following sentence: "Louise Bausiere, who spent the last two years working on the cathedral's knave, told NBC News Wednesday said [sic] she hoped people would admire what the team of craftspeople had done.1" "Knave" is an old-fashioned word for a dishonest or untrustworthy man2, as well as an alternative name for a Jack in a deck of cards. So, the Knave of Hearts, who stole the tarts in the nursery rhyme, is a Jack of Hearts3. Puzzle fans may be familiar with the type of logic puzzle in which knights always tell the truth and knaves always lie.
So, what could be meant by Bausiere "working on the cathedral's knave"? Does Notre Dame have its own designated rascal? Obviously not; instead, what Bausiere spent a couple of years working on was the nave4. "Nave" and "knave" are pronounced exactly the same, and the only difference in spelling is the silent "k" on "knave", but they mean very different things. A nave is the central part of the floorplan of a church running its length from the front entrance to the transepts5.
Since both "nave" and "knave" are English words, a pure spell-checking program won't catch the substitution of one for the other. I checked the example sentence in several online spelling or grammar checkers and some found nothing wrong with it, others at least noticed the ungrammatical "said", and a couple actually suggested dropping the "k" on "knave".
There's an old proverb that "knaves and fools divide the world"6, but naves and transepts divide a cathedral.7
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