Puzzled

by David Astle

  Difficult clue, but this is Bunthorne. When Bob passed away in 2006, his obituary listed the man’s many passions, all of which his puzzles reflected. You name it – jazz, wine, Dickens – and you’d often need it, entering his grids. Here the topic is paediatrics, or is Dr Seuss a ruse? Raise the cluster of words and ISSUES will emerge, another word for children.

  As we’ll discover in the next chapter, the reversal formula is a popular mixer with other recipes, and the reason for delaying its appearance in the book. When encountering hybrids, you should always keep the idea of reversal alive, and sweep the wordplay for any talk of moving up or back.

  Leaving us with the final example: A bit of advice about depression (3). Breezy on paper, this clue from Cincinnus is handpicked for a reason, namely the dilemma of a central signpost.

  Remember the muddle this problem sparked with anagrams? If your cue to scramble sits amidships, then which side is the mixing fodder? Reversals can suffer a kindred curse. In this clue about is a subtle signal to U-turn, which is also treacherous, since about has also been a steadfast signpost among containers.

  Can you sense the oxygen thinning? In the last few chapters we’ve learnt that recipes can blend, and now we’re seeing how certain signposts – like about or off or without – can flag alternative approaches. This is how it should be, scaling the giddy peak of Mount Cleverest. The higher we climb the smarter we have to be, the more caution we need to exercise.

  But at least our earlier answers have given us the footholds to help with the final assault. And where hybrids are involved – like Bunthorne’s example – or dilemmas emerge – like this latest clue – then we have the experience to get over the challenge. As every PHRASE unravels, we inch closer to becoming a SHERPA.

  Here’s my TIP then, my bit of advice about depression: step light, keep flexible and don’t fall down any great PIT, your answer. In a sense, the clue tells you which word needs reversing, the signpost of about welded tighter to the first definition. Though in the end we needed to make a leap of faith, and look – we survived. And the summit is beckoning.

  Before we advance, though, let’s grapple with our Master clue:

  Snub regressive outcast (5)

  In the grid our toeholds offer R_P_ _.(Any suggestions?) Remember, we need a word that’s flippable, just like PARTS gave way to STRAP. Two words in fact, where one means snub and the other outcast, with regressive your signpost.

  Yes, a central signpost again, but now the toeholds come into play. Without them, LEPER (an outcast) could be as legit a solution as REPEL (to snub). Fill it in. Adjust your crampons. The peak is peeking through the clouds.

  RECIPE PRECIS: REVERSALS

  Depending on how your answer lies – Across or Down – the reversal clue will tell you to turn your letters back – or up. On the horizontal, watch for such signposts as around, back, go west, mirror, receding, reflected, retiring, retreat, return, reverse, revolutionary, wheel and withdraw. For the vertical, look for climbed, flipped, hang-up, head over heels, invert, lifted, mounted, over, overturn, raised, rose, up and upset. Gnivlos doog.

  QUIZLING 25.1

  What word for careless can be made endless

  And reversed to make mates cheerless?

  QUIZLING 25.2

  If every word in the English language is spelt backwards, which ‘word’ would appear last in this bizarre new dictionary?

  QUIZLING 25.3

  Explain why 50 in 09 reversed

  Is a weather pattern by which our world is cursed.

  CHAPTER 26

  Pacific islander immune to

  revolution (7)

  As a bub you’re loved by Mum – or Mom maybe – plus your dad, your nan and pop, even a big sis if she’s around. More than loved, you are deified. In the eye of kin, your every peep is a wow, every deed you do a minor aha. Developing into a tot, going from boob to pap, you learn to poop in the toot. No longer on the tit, you have enough pep till noon when you hit the cot for more zzzz.

  Living proof we are born to palindromes. That last paragraph had 23 of the suckers, words spelt the same in either direction. Twenty-three and you’re barely two years old. Stats don’t lie.

  KAYAK is a palindrome, as is RACE CAR. Both modes of transport are identical in reverse, just like A TOYOTA.

  Compare this to words in our previous chapter, where STRAP and BULB render new results when spun. Dimitri Borgmann, a brilliant logologist (or word buff), called this versatile bunch of words semordnilaps, where DOG is GOD when chasing his tail.

  Try breaking the ice at your next cocktail party by saying, ‘Did you know that semordnilaps are also known as volvo-grams, backwords, semi-palindromes or anadromes?’ And see how far that gets you.

  Each term is just a fancy label for a city like POTSDAM, a mad stop on your next Eurail adventure. When TURNED is turned, the wordsmith can imagine a randy lion racked by DEN RUT. Maybe the poor beast is pining for the giant harlots found backwards in STRATAGEM.

  Palindromes, on the other hand, are spin-proof. The word derives from Greek, meaning ‘running back again’. Twirl RADAR all you like – palindromes are incorruptible.

  Believe it or not, a figure named Sotades the Obscene, a poet dating back to 300 BC, is the reputed father of the palindrome, but that’s like saying Homer invented the comma, or Aristotle the dangling participle. The palindrome has long been a strand in the human tapestry.

  Related in style, a popular writing method in ancient times was called boustrophedon, which literally means ox-turning. If you imagine a bullock pulling a plough, working his way along one furrow, then turning to haul the plough in the opposite direction, then you have the essence of the boustrophedon, where a writer like Sotades might start his first line in standard fashion, left to right, only for the next line to pivot at the end, and travel right to left.

  As for why this style was hip among Hellenic scribes, the debate continues. Maybe the reverse line reduced smudges on the papyrus, or abrasions on the tablet, or maybe the vogue rested in our ancient fetish for language looping. Across Greece and Italy, within the grounds of ancient temples, many fountains carry the palindrome of Nipson anomemata me monan opsin, which translates as ‘Wash the sins, not only the face’.

  On conquering Britannia, the Romans built new temples and cities, with one site near Gloucester presenting an opaque palindrome to archaeologists. Known as the Sator Stone, the puzzle was unearthed in 1868 in modern-day Cirencester, a market town north-west of London. Was it a spell? A code? Here’s how the original enigma appeared:

  S A T O R

  A R E P O

  T E N E T

  O P E R A

  R O T A S

  Viewing the square as one line of text, reading left to right, the stone reveals a palindrome, but why? And what did it mean? Theories bloomed in academia. Translation depended on where you divided the words. Either it meant ‘The sower Arepo holds the wheels at work’ or ‘Arepo the sower holds the wheels with force’. Question being: who was Arepo? Was this a word game or did the inscription carry a deeper significance?

  As you can see, the five rows match the five columns. Several scholars suspected the text to be an incantation. The idea was bolstered by the ABRACADABRA precedent, this classical word of magic having that near-palindrome knack of being arranged into a pyramid of letters, spelling itself by degrees like so:

  A

  A B

  A B R

  A B R A

  A B R A C

  A B R A C A

  A B R A C A D

  A B R A C A D A

  A B R A C A D A B

  A B R A C A D A B R

  A B R A C A D A B R A

  This two-way patterning is a hallmark of many sacred words – think hocus-pocus or even TENET, our own expression of faith and a word that lies in the heart of the Sator Stone.

  Without doubt, one of the more radical guesses about the stone’s meaning was made by a German professor who reckoned the text to be a code adopted by
the first wave of Christians. With so many Colosseum lions to feed, the followers of Christ needed to keep hush-hush, which explains their use of the secret fish symbol of Yahweh and the clandestine catacomb services beneath the Eternal City. The Sator Stone, said the professor, was one more link in this secret chain. The central piece of evidence for this cultish idea was an anagram. Rearrange the stone’s 30 letters and you can create a symmetrical cross, with the phrase PATERNOSTER crossing itself at the central N. With a slight catch. Do the maths, and you’ll realise that two As and two Os are missing from the new combo. The professor argued that these were the Alpha and Omega of the Lord’s message, a divine punctuation that went to open and close the message. This last liberty alone tended to unglue the theory.

  So who was Arepo, the wheel holder? Historians scoured the annals for any mention of the name, but found nil. Maybe the verse was a metaphor? Yet whichever creed was implicated, it wasn’t Christianity, as news of Pompeii came to light.

  Amazingly, seventy years after the Sator Stone was found in England, a twin was uncovered in Pompeii. The discovery went to cool the Christian theory, given how early in the millennium Vesuvius had erupted and how strong were the pagan vestiges of Pompeii itself. In fact, the fluke of finding a replica stone now urged scholars to favour the wordplay notion. Rather than a piece of scripture, the square was deemed a nifty alignment, a palindrome broken into a tidy box, a feat so neat it warranted chiselling. Arepo and his wheel, in fact, could well comprise the world’s first crossword, or at least evidence of mankind’s enduring passion for the secret life of words.

  NEVER ODD OR EVEN – palindromes from home and away

  There she was, a beautiful woman in the grove, tempting the man to approach her with an extended hand and to say, ‘Madam, I’m Adam.’

  Our first scrap of human dialogue, and it’s palindromic. As was the woman’s reply: Eve, a name immune to revolution, joining the elite of Anna, Hannah, Elle, Viv and Bob. Meanwhile Anita is forever destined to wash the bucket in Spanish-speaking countries, trapped in the palindrome of Anita lava la tina.

  Finns hold the record in the single-word category, with their majestic Saippuakauppias, or soap merchant, owning pride of place in the Babel dictionary. And should a Swede ever say, ‘Ni talar bra Latin’ (or ‘You speak good Latin’), then you can probably recite the Sator Stone better than most.

  Perhaps the world’s best palindrome is French, the jury swayed by the rarity of a Q, as well as the sentence owning the whiff of scandal: Engage le jeu que je le gagne (or ‘Begin the game so that I may win’).

  Best known is the 1948 line by Leigh Mercer, an Englishman who saluted a certain engineering feat with some engineering of his own: A man, a plan, a canal – Panama! This gem has been spoofed a dozen times, with the pick coming from US sportswriter Roger Angell: A dog, a plan, a canal – pagoda!

  Maths professor Peter Hilton, once employed as a code-breaker at Bletchley Park, reputedly had a hand in forging one of our sleeker palindromes, despite its length: Doc, note. I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod.

  Dmitri Borgmann, the late word-buff of Illinois via the Ukraine, stylised several longer examples, with his most fluent effort invoking Rome: A new order began, a more Roman age bred Rowena.

  Longer palindromes exist, of course, with most getting silly after crossing an invisible line. Or they read beautifully, only for a leftover spanner to wreck the works. Here’s one by Anon, by far the most prolific palindromist in the Western canon, which opens with an easy grace only to founder by the finale: We repaid a no-name Pacific apeman on a diaper, ew!

  Which leads us into Polynesia, the focus of our latest clue. After double meanings on the Amazon, charades in Omaha and codes in the Kasbah, we need to swing the binoculars towards a tropical island. Let’s view the clue:

  Pacific islander immune to revolution (7)

  To get REPEL, our last answer, we obeyed the signpost, regressive. Here the wordplay invokes the spin-proof quality of the palindrome. HANNAH and ANNA can stand on their heads with impunity. DR AWKWARD can come and go as he pleases. Two clues from my own collection affirm the same truth:

  Chopper blade can spin either way = ROTOR

  Stand-up act unchanged = DEED

  The first is pretty clear, while the second belongs to a Down entry, allowing the signpost of stand-up to work, telling you to ‘erect’ the solution for zero effect. Our current clue travels the same road. Also reading down, the answer won’t change for being thrown upward.

  After so many palindromes, you also know that if the answer ends in N, it must have N at the start. Ditto for the U in Position 5 of our answer – the same vowel can safely occupy Position 3 as well. Which gives you the promising array of N _ U _ U _ N.

  The Pacific solution is NAURUAN, a native of Nauru. According to the World Factbook, your typical islander is likely to speak English, plus his own Micronesian tongue, though probably not the lingo of southern India: Malayalam.

  EVE ON REFLECTION – reversal clusters and ambigrams

  Backwards or forwards, the words SENILE FELINES give the one message. We call this a palindrome. Whereas a name like EDISON is dubbed an emordnilap, as it spells NO SIDE in reverse, a departure from the source word.

  But really, aren’t we splitting hairs? Who cares if HANNAH spells herself from right to left, compared to her little brother, LIAM, who goes postal on reflection? Both names defy the natural order of things. Volvogram, schmolvogram – I’m happy to treat both kids as palindromes. Both make sense in two languages: English and Hsilgne.

  PAM and EVE, for instance, are both remarkable girls. Both names can change direction – PAM spelling MAP and EVE staying EVE. The first girl has changed wholesale, while the second is notable for resisting change. Or maybe she has changed. EVE, I mean. Let me explain.

  Most words are nonsense in reverse, or hold sensible shreds within the bunkum. By way of experiment, let’s flip four more Pacific islands. Suddenly Tonga, Tuvalu, Fiji and Tahiti turn into AGNOT, ULAVUT, IJIF, ITIHAT. Mumbo-jumbo mainly, though a few words emerge in the backwash: NOT, LAV, HAT plus the domestic cleaner JIF. These little flukes fuel the stuff of reverse hybrids, where the setter breaks the answer into smaller pieces, with one piece viewed in reverse. TAHITI, say, might be sliced into HAT + IT + I, with the solver asked to switch the opening fragment.

  Those same four islands also confirm the treasure of PAM and EVE. For a word to make sense in reverse is unusual, whether that means retaining your own identity (EVE), or drafting MAP. This rarity alone throws the two categories (palindrome and emordnilap) into the one remarkable box. But straying deeper into the topic, we come across a nagging question of geometry: how ‘same’ is normal EVE from EVE-in-reverse?

  For starters, the letter E faces east, compared to a J, which looks to the west, or right-to-left. Hence, to achieve the EVE illusion as a physical stunt, the E’s of EVE would need to perform an about-face. (Picture EVE as a complex shape, rather than a girl’s name, and you may see what I’m driving at. Think geometry – not semantics.) The E’s need realigning for the palindrome to work purely. To get Zen for a moment, can the same girl return from the girl who made the outward journey? All this may sound inane – or insane – but orientation lies at the gist of some deep-geek wordplay we’re about to explore.

  TOOT might be closer to being a truer palindrome, as none of the letters needs realigning. Sorcery of this kind enters the genre of mirror-writing, where puzzle-makers and graphic designers treat words as physical constructions, each with their own contours and axes of symmetry. Fog up your bathroom mirror (a ‘mirror rim’) and vertically write TOMATO. Note how the fruit appears the twin of its own reflection.

  SWIMS is another minor miracle. Capsize this page and now read the word. What do you see? That’s right: SWIMS. This is known as an inverted palindrome.

  Step by step we are nearing the mind-spinning science of ambigrams, the visual equal of palindromes that arose in the Strand Maga
zine of London, in the early 1900s. The feature was entitled Topsy-Turvies, with words like honey and chump written in strategic script. Overturn the magazine and the words appeared intact.

  Madison Avenue pushed it further during the 1960s, coining the term ambigrams along the way. With a few deft touches, DMC (DeLorean Motor Company) could read the same when the logo is revolved. A talented artist could even massage asymmetrical words like wavelength or blacksmith into ambigrams when the script is capsized. (Check out Angels & Demons, the Dan Brown thriller, and you’ll see that the first-edition cover can be read spine-left or spine-right.)

  To finish on matters reversible, we turn to a pilot named Douglas Corrigan. While the Texan never invented a palindrome, or crafted an ambigram, his deed of 1938 went on to inspire one of the century’s great pieces of retro-journalism.

  Corrigan was entrusted with the task of flying a single-engine plane from Brooklyn, NY, to Long Beach, CA, a four-hour flight that took our pilot some twenty-seven hours to complete. Corrigan blamed thick cloud and a wonky compass when asked to explain why the plane touched down in Ireland rather than California. Instead of mainland USA, the aviator had crossed the Atlantic by mistake. Though closer scrutiny of the ‘bungle’ reveals a measure of intent on Corrigan’s part, the pilot being found to have carried surplus fuel and food supplies.

  Genuine gaffe or not, the bloke came home a different man, much like BOB-in-reverse versus BOB flying eastwards. A ticker-tape parade marked his return, and he went on to write a best-selling autobiography as well as sponsoring a wristwatch that spun anticlockwise. But the headline to enshrine his name appeared in the New York Post on 5 August of that year, reading LIAH YAW-GNORW NAGIRROC.

  HALL OF FAME: REVERSALS

  Overseas race (5) [Taupi, Guardian]

  Direct from both directions (5) [Mudd, FT]

  Communist party rising is more unusual (5) [Gemini, Guardian]