Original Palindromes Oldest

Seed:  Bahamas.
Time: about 15 minutes.

I began the selection process by reading Main-H and clicking on the "bah" fragment in Habsburg. There, I chose Bahamas as a likely seed, thinking of Captain Ahab. From Bahamas, the "sam" fragment lead to "balsam", which proceeded to the Bahamas lab. The verb "from" reversed to "morf" and I considered using it as a misspelling of morph, but soon changed my mind.

* Bahamas sam Ahab
* Bahamas lab a balsam Ahab
* From Bahamas lab a balsam Ahab morf
* From Ma's lab, a balsam Morf.

After adding "From" in the third version, I looked up "morf" online and found the wonderful Edinburgh street musician. Reading about Morf's style and watching some of his videos, I changed direction. I found that I could remove Ahab and tweak the left-hand side to make a valid palindrome.

Seed:  water
Time:  5 minutes

I first explored the re-taw split of water, ignoring words that end in "re" (there are 905), and focusing instead on words that start with "taw". I quickly took a shine to tawnier and the palindrome soon fell into place. With "re" at the beginning, it looked like a legal title and I decided to stop there.

Seed:  wasted
Time:  20 minutes

I started this on the verbs list and landed on wasted. The rest followed fairly quickly. I strongly associate the word cadet with sailing ships, and mealworms with the hardtack sailors ate. Going with the nautical (or maybe spacefaring) theme, the word embark seemed like a good way to expand "em". Krab naturally follows, which is a marketing term for fake crabmeat. I liked the image of a cadet drunk on whatever makes Krab mealworms tolerable. Perhaps the combination ferments without any further assistance.

* wasted det saw
* wasted a cadet saw
* mealworm wasted a cadet saw Mr. Owla em
* Krab-mealworm-wasted, a cadet saw Mr. Owla embark.

This was the first palindrome I composed during an experiment to see how many I could create in a relatively short amount of time.

Seed:  water
Time:  30 minutes

I returned to the word water and took the split ret-aw along a different path.

* water ret aw
* water a caret aw
* era water a caret aware
* era water al claret aware

When that path ended, I tried the ret-a-w split instead. The left fragment revealed words ending in ret such as egret, regret, and margret. That last one got me thinking of names and I chose Greta. This is not actually in the Palindromedary, nor is the split reta-w. However, it does illustrate how a list of words can trigger other ideas.

Next I started looking for words to extend the palindrome on either end. The dial-laid ananym pair looked interesting. In the Reversed list, eight entries start with dial and I chose plaid. I found the absurd notion of plaid water appealing. The word dial gave the composition a marketing feel, so it seemed natural to make it into a sales pitch with a clear call to action.

* water reta w
* water Greta W.
* said water greta w dias
* laid water greta w dial
* plaid water greta w dial p
* for plaid water greta w dial prof
* Ban for plaid water greta w dial prof-nab
* Bats for plaid water greta w dial prof-stab
* Mad for plaid water, Greta W? Dial Prof. Dam.