Amaryllis sillyramA

Well it is time for a new palindrome!

As some have noticed, I have fallen out of the habit of observing the first of the month by putting up a new palindrome.

An aside: nowadays, the first of the month means one thing: little M gets to have new toenail polish! To me, she does seem a bit young for polish — she’s four — but I decided a toenail polishing session once a month would be okay. She’ll be ten before we go to fingernails. Or at least that’s the plan for now. Lately we’ve been using a pink sparkly glow-in-the-dark polish for her, and a dark sky blue shade for me. We both love our fancy toenails.

Ahem! So! Palindrome! The current palindrome laxity was brought to my attention once again by the lovely Lisa, in regard to the CRABS etc. post from a few days ago. She was thinking I might be doing a crab-related palindrome. I thought that was a fine idea, but did not know of any. Googled “crab palindrome” and what do you know! Not only is there an excellent actual crab-related palindrome, short-n-sweet and also alcohol-related (win win!) but it turns out that there is also a more profound connection between palindromes and crabs. See (from Wikipedia):

The word “palindrome” was coined from Greek roots palin (πάλιν; “again”) and dromos (δρóμος; “way, direction”) by English writer Ben Jonson in the 17th century. The actual Greek phrase to describe the phenomenon is karkinikê epigrafê (καρκινικὴ επιγραφή; crab inscription), or simply karkinoi (καρκίνοι; crabs), alluding to the backward movement of crabs, like an inscription that can be read backwards.

How about that? And: in some contexts, crab actually means palindrome, or palindromous. (Palindromedary?) For instance, a crab canon is a palindromous piece of music. And Crab Canon is also the name of a palindromous section in Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. And there is the Crab Carillon, a sculpture in San Diego made of 488 chimes; when struck by passing pedestrians the chimes play a palindromic song.

Crab palindrome indeed! Thank you, Lisa!

——————————
For the record: This month’s palindrome: BAR CRAB
And last month’s: RACE CAR
And the one before that: !HARRUH HURRAH! I think? Or was it Hurrah harruh? And were those exclamation points there? I really should write these things down.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011 at 10:48 pm and is filed under blague, Palindromania!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.