Palindrome

By The Manolith Team on December 13th, 2008

No, son! Onanism’s a gross orgasm sin – a no-no, son. I don’t think our dads ever told us that or anything to that effect. I mean what father would want to introduce his impressionable son to a word like “orgasm”. However, if you read the statement above again, only this time backwards – you would find that it reads exactly the same. It’s a palindrome, son. No, no you overeager beaver a palindrome has nothing to do with Sarah Palin though her name would be a palindrome if it were Sarah Palinnilap Haras

Any word, phrase, or sequence of letters or numbers that reads the same forward and backward is a called a palindrome. Palindromes have been with us since ancient times and exist in all languages. Even days can be palindromic – the 20th February 2002 (20-02-2002) was palindromic. It is in a man’s nature to search for analogies and uses for a given thing so we find that palindromes exist in music, arithmetic, acoustics, and even molecular biology.

And can political journalists be far behind trying to come up with witticisms with this very useful tool for humor. Here are some political palindromes.

A palindrome spelled backwards is semordnilap which is also a perfectly accepted and fairly well-used word in the English language. A semordnilap is a word which spelled backwards becomes another word. Okay, do we have a semordnilap in this text? Think!!. Some examples of semordnilaps are -