Palindromy\u27s Unseen Virtual Verse

A surprising and little-recognized property of rhyming, end-to-end palindromic verse is that, contrary to intuition, the order of the lines in such verse may often be transposed in a number of ways without loss of either rhyme or palindromicity. Such line-order permutations can (a) preserve both the verse\u27s original rhyme and palindromicity schemes, (b) change its rhyme scheme, (c) change its palindromicity scheme or (d) change both its rhyme and palindromicity schemes

The Heptcat\u27s Other Trick

In the February 2003 Word Ways, the HeptCat Perspicuous Palindrome Producer was introduced as a device for the semi-automatic generation of over 200 billion different palindromic sentences. But that is not the HeptCat\u27s only palindromical talent; this cat of seven segments also has the latent ability to engender indefinitely long, grammatical, multi-sentence passages that are end-to-end palindromes

Six-Line RETEP Verse

Rhymed, end-to-end palindromic (RETEP) verse, as I conceive of it, has only one obligatory rule which is not self-explanatory, and that is that to qualify as RETEP, a verse must possess a least two mutually exclusive pairs of rhyming lines

Swinburne\u27s Nephelidia

Conventional literary wisdom has it that Swinburne\u27s Nephelidia ( Cloudlets ) must have been intended as a parody of its author\u27s own poetic style. Perhaps so - it does, certainly, share a characteristic style of construction with much of his other verse

Knight\u27s Challenge Answered

Only one solution was received for the Five-Jog Knight puzzle contest posed in the November Word Ways. Submitted in mid-December, editor Jeremiah Farrell\u27s solution managed to achieve a 20/20 Collegiate score, which is to say that every word in its 20-word word set is an entry in Webster\u27s New Collegiate Dictionary. Such perfection had not been expected

Demi Ran, Nan, Anna Rimed

Although end-to-end-palindromic verse that is also rhyming and metrical was pioneered by J.A. Lindon and Howard Bergerson more than three decades ago, very long examples of the form have hitherto occurred only in a short story by George Marvill. Such compositions are not, however, infeasible in reality; the one that follows, in fact, is about twice as long as the longest such effort imagined by Marvill. More challenging than lengthiness in this verse is sensibility, which is courted here mainly at the quatrain level

218 Color Names Used in Palindromes

People who persist for very long in the composition of palindromes sooner or later acquire a good familiarity with the most easily accessible vocabulary available to such writing, and are sometimes moved to remark upon its seeming paucity

Trinanagrams

These trinanagrams - variants of bananagrams in which there are three mystery words rather than two - are dedicated to Edmund Conti in appreciation of his 21 recently concluded installments of Bananagrams in Word Ways. To solve a trianagram, first guess the mystery word at the end of the first line of the couplet, based on clues and context. The mystery word at the end of the second line will be reversal word which rhymes with the first word, and the third mystery word will be the reversal of the second word

The Governor, or the Devil

When either intentional or accidental occult messages are discovered in the body of some prominent text, they are of potential interest to logology. Here is the story of one such message of recent occurrence whose true nature -- accidental or artificial -- is a subject of dispute. All of the particular facts cited herein were taken from a front page article in the October 28, 2009 San Francisco Chronicle, which article may be examined in its entirety at the Chronicle\u27s website, sfgate.com

Top-Eye, The Peyote Man

I was much impressed by Susan Thorpe\u27s article Constrained Pyramids in the February issue of Word Ways. Her constrained word pyramids seems almost magically ingenious. Her creations, along with Anil\u27s recent discussion of the impregnate-permeating anagram, inspired the keyboard doodle below. In my little transposing sailor man (to avoid copyright infringement, let\u27s call him Top-Eye which neatly transposes to what he\u27s got in his pipe), the makeup of a letter group changes only to add or drop letters when the word length changes