About Palindromes

In the comments section of my last post, Palin Talk, my old friend and fellow-blogger Mavin mentioned Palindromes in a Limerick which he so wonderfully produced instantly, which goes as below:

Long years back I learnt about the Palin-drome,
Whilst whiling away time at the aero-drome,
Later in life, I heard about Palin the dish,
Who had our dear Vinod in a swish,
It was later diagnosed as Gullible Sheep syn-drome.
:-)

What followed was a word play of anagrams, limericks and the like between fellow bloggers Mavin and Vinod Sharma!

I was fascinated by palindromes even when I was in college in the late 70’s. In fact my first published article titled “A way with words” in the Free Press Journal was all about wordplay such as palindromes, anagrams and lipograms.

If you thought Palindromes were some kind of private aerodrome for Sarah Palin, its not. Palindromes are words, sentences, paragraphs or numbers which, if read backwards are the just the same as when they are read forwards.

Nitin and Nayan, my friends in school had a penchant for palindromes ever since they learnt that their names were palindromes too. We had gathered quite a few in those Google-less days: Madam, malayalam, civic, level, radar, rotor were early palindromes we had in our list already.

One of the earliest palindromes possible was if Adam would have said to Eve:
"Madam, in Eden, I'm Adam". With this we had graduated to palindrome sentences. Was English the language Adam spoke? One wonders.

The historic utterance attributed to Napoleon upon the sighting of Elba, the island where the British had sent him to exile was the first palindrome we collected:
“Able was I, ere I saw Elba” , he is reported to have said.
Since he was a Frenchman, I wonder who translated it to this amazing palindrome?

The phenomenal feat of the construction of the Panama Canal gave us another popular palindrome that was next in our list:
“A man, a plan, a canal, Panama”
A fitting tribute to a great constructive work!

Next we learnt about this one:
“Straw? No. Too stupid a fad. I put soot on warts”

Dammit, I’m mad! With the advent of internet, Google Search, Wikipedia and such tools, why do I have to list them here? Read the entire list of palindromes here.

Our search for the longest palindrome ended with an article in the newspapers about the the longest palindrome, by Georges Perec, a treatise on palindromes, in French which had 9691 words published in 1969!

Georges Perec, member of the Paris OULIPO group (Workshop of Potential Literature), wrote a long piece of palindrome prose in 1969, consisting of 9691 words. The word 'palindrome' appears in the first sentence, and consequently, its reversal in the last. This is the first in a series of meta-palindromes (or, palindromes of the palindrome) by various authors.
Beginning and end read:
"Trace l'inégal palindrome. Neige. Bagatelle, dira Hercule. Le brut repentir, cet écrit né Perec. L'arc lu pèse trop, lis à vice versa. Perte. Cerise d'une vérité banale, le Malstrom, Alep, mort édulcoré, crêpe porté de ce désir brisé d'un iota" ...
...
"À toi, nu désir brisé, décédé, trope percée, roc lu. Détrompe-là. Morts : l'âme, l'élan abêti, revenu. Désire ce trépas rêvé : si va ! S'il porte, sépulcral, ce repentir, cet écrit me perturbe le lucre : Haridelle, ta gabegie ne mord ni la plage ni l'écart."

Georges Perec is also the author of a 300-page French Novel “La Disparition”, without using the popular vowel ‘e’ ever! Such a composition is called a lipogram. Amazing Frenchman this!

Thanks, Mavin and Vinod for taking me down memory lane, with anagrams, palindromes, limericks once again! Nostalgia indeed!
Now that is not a new drug variant of analgin for my nostrils!