palindromic?

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 10/11/07, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
> Sophie Harrison, review of Peter Nadas's Fire and Knowledge, NYT Book
> Review, 9/7/07, p. 19:
>
> No one writes a palindromic phrase like Nadas.  On writing: "The
> ideal literary sentence may be born of imagination or experience, but
> it must gauge its imagination within its experience and its
> experience within its imagination."
>
> further examples follow -- of chiastic phrases, not palindromic
> ones.  chiasmus and palindromes both involve reversals, but in
> different ways.
>
> it looks like harrison reached into her stock of technical terms and
> pulled out a wrong (but semantically related) one.

Well, chiastic constructions like "its imagination within its
experience and its experience within its imagination" vaguely resemble
"word palindromes" -- typical examples of which include:

So patient a doctor to doctor a patient so.
Girl, bathing on Bikini, eyeing boy, finds boy eyeing bikini on bathing girl.
You can cage a swallow, can't you, but you can't swallow a cage, can you?
Bores are people that say that people are bores.
Women understand men; few men understand women.


--Ben Zimmer

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