Original Palindromes Oldest

Since Amos couldn’t unsee it, he thought that sharing it with someone else might be helpful.

After I wrote the Semi Times palindrome, it rattled around inside my head for a while. Driving a truck tends to rattle everything around.

I thought about how we refer to magazines when we talk. Mostly we say stuff like, “I saw a cool headset in Semi Times.” So I wrote that down.

in Semi Times ni

Then I looked up words that start with ni in the Palindromedary. It’s a long list. I found lots of potential palindromes, but they mostly didn’t make any sense. When I saw the word nipped, inspiration hit. It occurred to me that Semi Times could also be the name of a film.

Depp, in Semi Times, nipped

So Johnny Depp in a film, or maybe a magazine photoshoot. I wondered what he might be nipping. Eventually, a weird little story came to me.

On the set of Semi Times, Johnny Depp wandered by the catering table before his next scene. With the cameras rolling, he spoke his lines. Then he pulled a lemon from his pocket and nipped it. Later, when the director asked why he did that, Depp only said, “No melon. O’ lemon!”

The existing palindrome that inspired this was “No melon, no lemon.” I credited Johnny Depp with my altered words as the explanation for a longer palindrome I submitted earlier. All I did was remove an extra N in the middle. Think of it as a rejection of melon and an ode to lemon. Pucker up!

Strange fare, but don’t knock it until you try it, I suppose.

Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias may have replied with this answer when asked what provisions he would like to bring along when he became the first European navigator to round the southern tip of Africa in 1488.  I would think it likely that his ships carried them.

I started out thinking of knock-knock jokes and how to make a palindrome in that theme. I combined James Joyce’s tattarrattat with the question “Who is it?” To me that seemed like a decent simulation of the classic knock-knock joke. After that, it was just a matter of expanding “Oh, W” into something more meaningful. But not by much.

It would have much more sense if the game “Marco Polo” had been given this name instead. Most kids learn something about the Venetian traveller but it seems that not many learn about palindromes.

Someone seems a little insecure, though I’m sure the band was loved—and hated—by many.

The young Camelid, having been curious of his ancestry, informed his mother that the results of his recent DNA test indicated that his bloodline did not include alpaca, as he had once suspected.

Marked rejected 7/12/2021 14:54 by rayf, discovered not original

Somehow, elephant never seemed like a word that could fit into a palindrome. Nonetheless, one day I typed it into the Palindrome Composer and boom! Reversed, it's tnahpele. I quickly saw the words nah and Pele. Those worked perfectly with elephant.

Elephant? Nah, Pele.

I added wow to both ends, expressing surprise and implying a loud noise or shaking ground.

As it turned out and for other reasons unknown, Delia was marked off the list simply because Fiona arrived by boat.

After the senior officer’s recent rhinoplasty, the decorated soldier couldn’t help but notice.

Thinking that she would achieve a more lucrative deal, Dianne disguised herself as a famous baseball player.

Since I use the word compose (and its variants) frequently when discussing the Palindromedary, I thought I should try to use it in a palindrome. I chose the esop-moc split because the first thing I noticed was that esop is part of the fabled name Aesop. Putting all that together, I got this:

compose a Aesop moc

For a while I tried words beginning with moc. The Palindromedary only lists seven and I began with mocha. I was thinking of Aesop composing all night and needing mocha to keep going. Never mind the anachronism. That didn't work out as I expected.

The last three words I examined were mock, mocker and mocks. K is often difficult to work into a palindrome, but I got lucky. I tried mocks first.

sk compose a Aesop mocks

Can you guess what happened next? Aesop mocks it. A predictable result if a newby gave Aesop a fable to critique. The palindrome expanded like this.

tisk compose a Aesop mocks it

On a whim I tried putting the word story in the middle. To maintain the symmetry, I also added the reverse, leaving out the y: story rots. From there, a bit of punctuation makes it all hang together.

Every day as I’m pulling into the parking lot at work, I pass the same “One Way” sign on my right. Occasionally I think I should yaw to starboard and go tearing down that street in the wrong direction, just to break the shackles of routine. But whenever I think there’s no way to push onward, I take solace in the power and fun of words, and I keep on yawing toward the distant harbor.

The simplest of words can often trigger an original palindrome. Have a nice trip? I did. The Palindrome Composer came through again. Trip reverses to pirt, with a split of pir-t. A handful of words end in pir, including tapir. “Trip tapir t” is not a palindrome, but “trip a tapir t” is. I didn't bother to look through all the words that begin with T. I just chose today and called it good.