Most people know what this is, a word or phrase or sentence that reads the same forwards and backwards.  The term comes from two Greek roots: palin, “back” or “again,” and dromos, “running,” as in “hippodrome,” where horses race, or “velodrome,” where bicycles do.  In other words, a “palindrome” runs forward, then runs back again.  Several popular first names are palindromic, a noticeably large number of them beginning with “A.”  For girls, there are Anna, Ada, Ava, Aya, Elle, Eve, Hannah, Lil, Nan; for boys, Abba, Asa, Bob, Odo, Otto.  Viv could be a girl or boy.  “Idi” is another possibility, but would anyone name a child after Idi Amin?  And there are palindromic nicknames, of course: Sis, Mom, Pop, Bub, Dad, Pip (as in the childhood name of the hero of Great Expectations), Gig (as in the name of the actor Gig Young), Pep (as in the nickname of the novelist Nathanael West).   And surnames: the erotic writer Anais Nin; the artist and famous widow Yoko Ono; the former infielder for the Indians and Rangers Toby Harrah, who wore the palindromic number 11 on his uniform.  Given the fantastic amount of baseball trivia out there (and baseball “stats,” another palindrome), it will probably come as no surprise that someone has created a website collecting palindromic baseball names, indeed attempting to create a whole team out of palindromic players.  I’d like to know if there’s a website listing palindromes in one of the Dravidian languages of India, Malayalam, or featuring varieties of kayak, or sampling the songs of Abba, not omitting their hit number “SOS.”

Wow!  A lot of palindromes, huh?  Before you read this, madam, were they even on your radar?

Familiar palindromic sentences are Napoleon’s lament on his failing powers, “able was I ere I saw Elba,” and humankind’s Edenic progenitor introducing himself to his spouse-to-be Eve (herself, of course, palindromically named): “Madam, I’m Adam.”  My friend Gregory Hayes, a musician and aficionado of the palindrome, has furnished me with several, including at least one with a musical theme—old-fashioned concert-goer, confronted with a contemporary piece: “La! Not atonal!”  To this might be added the German palindrome about the Romantic sound of a string instrument (see English horn).  I also admire a longer palindrome sounding like a soliloquy spoken from the footlights by some Renaissance machiavel, Byronic misanthrope, or villain in nineteenth-century melodrama: “Do good, I?  No, evil I deliver.  Reviled, I live on.  I do?  O God!”  In the Oxford Guide to Word Games, by Tony Augarde, an indispensable guide to this and many other forms of linguistic ingenuity, you will find palindromes in Latin, Spanish, and French, plus an English palindrome 126 words, 467 letters, long.  Still, it’s the shorter palindromes which often seem more evocative, more mysterious.  What’s the title of a painting, perhaps in the style of Edward Hopper, showing some city-dweller miserably all by herself, hungover and suffering?  “Lonely Tylenol.”   The gem of Greg’s collection, meanwhile, almost a little poem, is the response of a fellow asked what he wants on his hamburger.  He ponders, maybe thinking of a hot date coming up: “Onion?  No, I . . . no.”