A pardonable mistake is one that is not very bad — you should not have done it, but people can forgive it. The word is a little formal; in easy talk someone might say that’s forgivable or that’s fair enough. You often meet it before error, mistake, pride, or anger: a pardonable error. It means “can be forgiven,” not “has already been forgiven.” Though actually the opposite, unpardonable (“too bad to forgive”), is the more famous of the pair, and pardonable was built backwards from that. You still use pardonable when you want to be kind but precise: the slip was human, not wicked.

情有可原的