In the seventeenth century, André Pujom, finding that his name spelled Pendu à Riom, fulfilled his destiny by cutting somebody’s throat in Auvergne, and was actually hung at Riom, the seat of justice in that province.
— William Dobson, Poetical Ingenuities and Eccentricities, 1882
inkle
v. to attend a party to which one has not been invited
American philologist Revilo P. Oliver had a palindromic name — it reads the same backward and forward. In his family, he said, the name “has been the burden of the eldest or only son for six generations.”
And it cost him — at least one journal rejected his articles as fraudulent.
saulie
n. a hired mourner at a funeral
GATEMAN, sides reversed, is NAMETAG.
And that sentence is a palindrome.
dyscallignia
n. the dislike of beautiful women
In 1965, Dmitri Borgmann noted that this expression:
11 + 2 – 1 = 12
… is valid also when interpreted as a set of characters:
11 “+ 2” = 112; 112 “- 1” = 12
… as a set of Roman numerals:
XI + II = XIII; XIII – I = XII
… and even as a set of letters:
ELEVEN + TWO = ELEVENTWO
ELEVENTWO – ONE = LEVETW (= TWELVE)
GOLDENROD-ADORNED LOG is a palindrome.
In 1994, Leonard Gordon showed that all 37 presidential surnames to date can fit into a 22 × 18 rectangle:
