Original Palindromes Newest

I was in the bathroom and spaced out on my mouthwash for healthy "gums", and reversed it into smug. Then I played on the reversal thing on the Palindrome Composer until, I came up with "spits", which is the last step in mouthwash. Having slight dyslexia helps, because I reverse words anyway.

Time: half-hour. I started with trucker, naturally, and I used the palindrome composer. I was surprised by the words available for the split rek-curt. I chose trek for the left word, which made a short palindrome right off the bat! Then I played with the words starting with curt. I liked curtailed because it made sense; an organized convoy of truckers on a trek that got canceled.

What I had: Delia trucker trek curtailed.

Going beyond that was harder. Since the words were all complete, I had to find new ones to expand the sentence. I noticed that "trucker trek curtailed" felt poetic and it could be the middle of a haiku. A haiku palindrome would be cool, so I went with that flow.

With Delia on the first line of the haiku, and the trek canceled, it just occurred to me that maybe a trek organizer would start telling the drivers the bad news. "Go home" felt like a good phrase, and to my surprise, it worked just as well in reverse. I'll let you figure out what the last line means. After all, art is in the eye of the beholder.

And that was it. Finished. As people used to say where I grew up, "It ain't perfect, but it'll do.”

Seed:  wonton
Time:  15 minutes

I was testing some code and entered the classic palindrome, "Wonton, not now!" As so often happens, a couple of random perverse thoughts popped up.

One was to add a k between wonton and not: Wonton knot, now! The other told me to replace the homophone won with one. That lead to another short palindrome.

One-ton knot, Eno.

Then I played around with the natural response a person might have to a one-ton knot: "That's one big knot." The last three words completed the excercise and I had a conversation between a couple of friends admiring an example of post-Gordian conspicuous consumptionism.

Seed:  raffle
Time:  1 hour

I entered raffle in Word Explorer and added an obvious letter t to the elf-far split. By swapping t-raffle for elf-fart, I dropped the extra t to get the valid palindrome, "elf fart raffle."

* raffle elf-far
* t raffle elf fart
* elf fart raffle

Then I just looked for ways to expand that silly phrase. Both the verb and ananym lists helped.

* Reviled elf fart raffle, deliver!
* Detailed elf fart raffle deli at ed
* Flower elf fart raffle re wolf
* Iron elf fart raffle Nori
* Peek at elf fart raffle, Tak. Eep!
* Know elf fart raffle, Wonk?
* Evil elf fart raffle. Live!
* Wes knits evil elf fart raffle. Live stinks! Ew!

Seed:  ananym
Time:  1 minute

I chose ananym as my preferred term for a word that makes a different word when reversed. On a whim I reversed ananym and saw "My nana," which caught my attention (even though my family never used the endearment 'nana' for our grandmothers). Then I decided to include an ananym in the palindrome. The finished composition came to me in a flash.

Why did I choose ananym from the nineteen terms (anagram, ananym, antigram, drow, half-palindrome, heterodrome, inversion, palinode, recurrent palindrome, retronym, reversagram, reversal, reversal pair, reversible, reversible anagram, reversion, semordnilap, sotadic palindrome, and word reversal, according to The Dictionary of Wordplay by Dave Morice) already in use? It was not random.

First, I eliminated the multi-word terms because I wanted a single word. Then I looked at the palindromic potential of each of the remaining terms. I also considered the nature of the term's usage, whether authoritative sources accepted the term, and the word's etymology. Only ananym satisfied all five criteria.

Bonus reason:  "Ban ananym" is also "banana-nym".