Original Palindromes Newest

Now I know to an outsider, this will sound like the most British thing you could read, but it is true. In the UK, we have a celebrity chef called Nigella Lawson. She is the daughter of Lord Nigel Lawson, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, and former wife of billionaire Charles Saatchi. Nigella is exactly how you would imagine a person from the elite section of society to be. She—I do believe unfairly—comes into a lot of flack for her differences to the average working population, with her turn of phrase and her inclusion of the most unheard of and unfindable ingredients.

During her cookery shows, she will often regale us with tales of her past and heritage—worlds that are completely alien to the viewers. On one particular show, Nigella told us about her Norwegian heritage, and the divine smells from the village bakery as a prompt for her “boller” recipe—traditional Norwegian buns. The viewer thinks this will actually be something I can make myself. After all, what can be so difficult about buns? Then she pulls the table cloth from beneath. “Make sure to add cardamom, a sneaky little spice coming from Indonesia.”

And with that one sentence, your ten-minute-long dream of baking Norwegian buns is taken away.

One of the most famous examples of ancient palindrome play, The Sator Square, is something I’ve always been inspired to recreate—except in English rather than Latin. The central word to the Sator Square is tenet. At the time of writing, Tenet was Christopher Nolan’s latest cinematic production in the UK. After restrictions on movement and cinema openings, due to COVID19, were eased in the UK, Tenet was one of very few of the major studios’ films to get a theatrical release.

The film even had a “palindromic” time structure.

I nod with approval.

Time:  15 minutes
Seed:  electrons

Browsing the Main list, I saw the entry for electrons. The reverse split stood out:  snort-cele. At the very least, I wanted to know how many words ended with snort so I entered electrons into the Word Explorer field in Palindrome Composer. Then I selected the snort-cele split. 

So how many words end in snort? Just one, snort, but that was enough. I wrote "electrons snort cele" in the Current Composition field. Somehow that didn't sound useful, so I reversed the phrase to "snort cele electrons" and saw a possibility. The first word that begins with cele is celeb. I added the b to the end of cele and got "snort celeb electrons." That's a truly surreal phrase. It also solved the doubled-letter in the middle problem. Now the palindrome isn't quite so obviously symmetrical. But I didn't want to stop there.

Playing around, I expanded the phrase to "I snort celeb electrons i." For no particular reason I expanded the right side to the word inactive. Then the left side became evitcani and I added some spaces to make "evit can I snort celeb electrons inactive?"

That sounded unsatisfying, and, the only word ending in evit is the name Levit. Dropping evit, I looked at the remainder and came up with "can I snort celeb electrons in a c," which has a nice grammatical flow. Randomly trying cup for the last word, I decided it was finished. "Pu, can I snort celeb electrons in a cup?"

Pu is a name and also the atomic symbol for Plutonium, a rich source of electrons, both ordinary and celebrity.

This one grew naturally out of seeking reversals for elf. I figure an elf who lives underground is likely to develop a bit of a goggle—especially when suddenly assailed by a spectacularly beautiful woman decorated by the entrails of his legionnaires. The Dark Elves worship Lolth, Spider-Goddess of Chaotic Evil, so it’s not out of court for a more or less heroic blade-maid to take issue with them. Personally, I bristle at the almost-but-not-quite palindromable name Lolth: again, that wretched “ht” reversal. This calls for some neologisms; who’s with me? Let the Rise of the Htocracy begin!

The phrase “red dame” was actually the seed of this whole triplet. I was swapping palindromes with a lovely red-haired friend of mine, and paring this line down to four coherent words took over six hours. When it did finally “click,” it was more like an earthshaking ka-chunk.

Like any well-read, intelligent personage with a loving family, I spend most of my free time wondering what would happen if Red Sonja, the chainmail-bikini-wearing counterpart of Conan the Barbarian, took up arms against the Dark Elves of Menzoberranzan. After nigh-interminable research and rumination, I came to a three-part conclusion:

Drow spot a top sword:
Red dame, none madder.
Flee, ye gog-eye elf!

Regarding the first line, the drows, or drow, are the Dark Elves of D&D’s Menzoberranzan. The genesis of this line was, of course, the reversal of drows and sword. I realized immediately that no palindrome can withstand a word like “fight,” cursed with the unmatchable “thg” clump when reversed, so I fell back on reader inference. Elves of any stripe tend to be aloof—in the eyes of impatient mortals, at least—and once I had that word, the word “fool” sprang out at me. Given that, it hopefully goes without explication that the “ah, ha” interjections, coupled with the image of a sword, add up to their foolish aloofness being under direct assault.

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".