PALINDROME

[Dr. Goodword]

• palindrome •

Pronunciation: pæ-lin-drom • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun

Meaning: No, it isn't Sarah Palin's home but one of two other things. 1. A number, word, or phrase with characters in the same order forwards and backwards, as stressed is desserts spelled backwards. (Is there a connection?) 2. (Biogenetics) A double strand of DNA in which the sequence of nucleotides in one strand is the reverse of that in the other.

Notes: A writer of palindromes is a palindromist, whose writings are palindromic or, if you need an extra syllable, palindromical. The adverb is palindromically. I'm not quite sure what we might do palindromically but, should we ever need to, we have a word for it.

In Play: 'In Play' is the place for palindromes, for palindromes are all play. "Go hang a salami; I'm a lasagna hog!" reads the same from left to right and right to left (ignoring punctuation, of course). "Was it Eliot's toilet I saw?" is another. In Stephen King's The Shining the palindrome murder was featured, for backwards it reads red rum (give or take a space). Hannah from Adaven, Nevada has a palindromic name in a palindromic town. How about that?

Word History: Today's Good Word is a mild make-over of Greek palindromos "running back again, recurring", made up of palin "again, backwards" + dromos "running". We find the root of palin in words referring to things ancient, such as paleontology and paleology "study of antiquities". Dromos comes from a root word that survived in Serbian and Romanian as drum "road". It is found in several other English words borrowed from Greek, including hippodrome, originally a stadium where horses (Greek hippos) ran, aerodrome, a word for "airport", where airplane runways are found, and syndrome, from syn "(together) with" + dromos, a set of symptoms that run together. (Aha! It would be live evil not to thank William Hupy for suggesting today’s Good Word.)

[Slava]

1. A number, word, or phrase with characters in the same order forwards and backwards, as stressed is desserts spelled backwards. (Is there a connection?)

Interestingly, this definition doesn't really cover what I think of as a palindrome. Or, to more specific, the example given isn't. Stressed may be desserts spelled backward, but they aren't the same phrase, as in all the other examples.

Is this a valid quibble on my part? Or am I mistaken? I'd like to think I'm able, but then again, I've never seen Elba.

By the way, in case you're interested, Adaven, Nevada is a real place.

[Perry Lassiter]

Certainly there's an adverbial use if you're into Tom Swifties: "Able was I ere I saw Elba," he commented palindromically. .