Outer Reaches of the Palindrome Page: 11
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THE SORCERY OF CONTEXT
Hello everyone; my name is Michael, and I am a palindromist.
Hi, Michael.
I wrote my first one in 1998. Five years later, I still write them on a daily basis. I read
everything backwards- just to see if I can glimpse a new palindrome. Words will not leave me
alone, and often times, (I confess) I write them when I should be paying attention in class - as a
student and as a teacher. They chase me through my nightmares. They spiral into my brain like
a giant corkscrew. I am absolutely helpless. If I were to try and quell them, they would rise forth
and crush me. They fascinate me ... they torture me ... they touch my imagination in
uncomfortable places ... it's a tough love.
A big part of that love is my personal need to understand palindromes. There's some type
of magical feeling contained in the writing and in the interpreting of a palindrome, and that
feeling cannot be described in binary terms, so I am avoiding writing an essay that purports to
prove something. Instinct cannot be proven, aesthetic appeal cannot be proven, intuition cannot
be proven- these are the three principles that I refer to whenever in my life I speak of "my
education" or "what I know." All I can do is explore the nature of the palindrome and hope to
glimpse its underlying sorcery.
There are countless one-word palindromes in the English language, many of them
common, such as "Mom", "Dad", "poop", "boob", "sees", "racecar", "level", and "rotor", as
well as the names "Bob", "Otto", "Ava", and "Hannah". At their most base level, one-word
palindromes signify a concept, and the words themselves are palindromic more by coincidence
than anything else; they sound perfectly natural when spoken. Slightly longer phrase
palindromes, like "a red-eyed era" and "to prefer pot" are evasive as naturally uttered speech and11
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McConnell, Michael Constantine. Outer Reaches of the Palindrome, thesis, December 2003; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4407/m1/14/: accessed May 22, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .