[Ads-l] Able Was I Ere I Saw Elba

[Laurence Horn]

Ah, well done--linking up with our “Ur” thread (not to be confused with our ur-thread). 


> On Apr 7, 2021, at 8:03 AM, James Landau <00000c13e57d49b8-dmarc-request at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 6 Apr 2021 21:08:58 Zone - 0400  Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote
> <begin quote><snip>—unless we’re insisting that the words themselves as well as the letters satisfy palindromicity, which of course would also rule out "A man, a plan, a canal—Panama!”, not to mention the ur-palindrome “Madam, I’m Adam”. 
> <end quote>
> Evidently King James English was widely spoken in ancient Mesopotamia (the site of Eden), as Abraham (then called Abram) appears to have heard the Ur-palindrome in question in the city of Ur.  cf Genesis 11:31 "Terah took his son Abram, his grandson Lot the son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, the wife of his son Abram, and they set out together from Ur of the Chaldeans for the land of Canaan..."
> 
> James Landau
> jjjrlandau at netscape.com
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org