Found in the ruins of Pompeii, the Latin inscription SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS (“The sower Arepo holds the wheels with effort”) may be the most symmetrical sentence ever composed. If it’s written conventionally, it’s a palindrome, reading the same forward and backward. And if it’s written into a square:
… it reads the same left to right, top to bottom, right to left, or bottom to top.
Most palindromes are spelled symmetrically, so their letters produce the same phrase whether read backward or forward:
Able was I ere I saw Elba.
But it’s also possible to do this at the level of words, as in this example:
You can cage a swallow, can’t you, but you can’t swallow a cage, can you?
When this is read backward, word by word, it produces the same sentence as when read forward. And it’s true!
Because of its cover design, some readers briefly imagined that SF author Jack Dann’s 1984 novel The Man Who Melted was called The Man Who Melted Jack Dann. That inspired some readers to search for other such titles, with some success:
Any others? You’ll get extra credit for bending parts of speech (Two Sisters Gore Vidal).
“The boy who explained the meaning of the words fort and fortress must have had rather vague ideas as to masculine and feminine nouns. He wrote: ‘A fort is a place to put men in, and a fortress a place to put women in.'”
— Henry B. Wheatley, Literary Blunders, 1893
goluptious
adj. delicious; voluptuous
On the Isle of Portland, in the English Channel, it’s considered bad luck to say the word rabbit.
So people use the term “underground mutton.”
genethliac
adj. relating to a birthday or to the casting of horoscopes
“Military intelligence,” said Groucho, “is a contradiction in terms.” Other examples:
Also: Dodge Ram.
flimp
v. to rob (someone) while a partner hustles
Chicago means “land of smelly onions.”
That’s how the native Potawatomi described the swampy area next to Lake Michigan. French explorers picked up the name, and it stuck.
