ABLE WAS I ERE I SAW PALINDROMES

A Card-Carrying Dyslexic Goes Bananas!

OK...the real fake quote from Napoleon is “Able was I ere I saw Elba.” (By which he would have meant: “I was very capable of enduring exile even before I arrived at Elba, my new island prison.”) I’m pretty sure Napoleon never said that, but it’s one of the two most-often-quoted palindromes.

A palindrome is a word, phrase or sentence that is spelled the same way backwards and forwards. Punctuation, capitalization, and even where the word(s) may break are usually ignored in a palindrome.

Every minute of every day I see palindromes in my mind based on things I see written out. For example, the words racecar and redder are palindromic words.

I can’t help but notice the possibility for multi-word palindromes in almost any word I see. They don’t have to make sense:

liar trail
loops lived @ devil’s pool

They may need exposition:

1960’s diet Coke for flying mammals: Bat Tab
A man named Slatner opens a store: slatner rentals
A mythical Missouri landmark where robbers hit pioneers on the head: Bonk Knob
Andre Agassi’s return: bold lob
Really expensive Mexican decorator item: elite tile
Shut-ins select another slip of paper in a game: warders redraw
Accessories to purse holders: strap parts
Big book on acting: emote tome
King’s beer: regal lager
Cat-eating alien run over by a steamroller: flat Alf
Begining of the day’s commute: “Start, rats!”
Cat’s fancy two-step: swap paws
Materials for permanent writing surfaces: slate metals
Line from Dante’s unpublished rap poem: lived a devil
Baby talk for an inventory control parent: emit poop time
Demon clown-fish: Nemo Omen
Lice-larvae/wasp crossbreed: sting nits

It’s a bit harder in Spanish, but here goes:
Guadalajara-to-Cancun early morning flight: ojo rojo
The trustworthy dance: el baile reliable
Pink bear: oso roso

Ignoring accent marks in the mirror image you can get:

Mom loves: ama Mamá
The Addams family’s Cousin It, to a nephew: Tío It

And, even keeping the accent marks, you can get:

To the river to hear it: al río oírla

Oldest known palindrome [Latin, First Century A.D.]

(I didn’t make this one up, but I wish I had):

The planter Arepo has [as his] works wheels [of wagons, wains or perhaps a plow]: Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas.

A dyslexic person, depending on the individual’s characteristics (there is a huge variety of dyslexic possibilities), can often read forward-backward (as in palindromes) freely, read upside-down easily, sight-read by blocky letter shapes (the shape of xjjlx only matches one word in English...apple), and can often read mirror writing with ease. (When I taught at Harrison High School I had a student named Jim McKay who could read upside-down as fast as I could...but when I accidentally put a filmstrip in backwards, he couldn’t read the mirror-writing nearly as easily as I could. We just watched the filmstrip flip-flopped and I read the captions to the class.)

Our motto: DYSLEXICS OF THE WORLD...UNTIE!