Palindrome Process

I’ve started playing Artwiculate again. At @attentive‘s request, here’s a rough transcript of how I build a palindrome entry containing the word of the day – in this case:

marionette

A palindrome is only possible if the reversed WOTD contains enough words, or parts of words:

ettenoiram

Usually, the first decision is whether the WOTD goes in the first or second half of the sentence:

marionette […] ettenoiram or ettenoiram […] marionette

But because marionette ends in the palindromic string ette, we can overlap that. This reduces the amount of work we have to do and makes the decision for us:

marionettenoiram

Next step: see if the reversed section has recognisable words, which it does. (If it didn’t, I’d give up at this point.)

marionette noir am

I’ve been thinking about Stravinsky, because the centenary of the première of Le sacre du printemps was this week, so ‘marionette noir’ immediately makes me think of Petrushka. Once there’s a topic the process becomes easier. So far we have a sentence fragment which is not grammatical, but a is a useful letter because it can be split:

marionette noir a m

What starts with m and has something to do with Stravinsky?

nredo marionette noir a modern

A good choice, because redo is a fairly flexible verb:

n redo marionette noir a modern

Hmm. Can we build further in either direction? How about ballet:

Tell ABN: redo marionette noir, a modern ballet!

Too bad the leader of the Ballets Russes wasn’t named Alexei Borodin Nureyev. Stupid reality. At this point I often try going for broke by chucking another big theme word in, which sometimes pays off, but not this time:

Stravinsky nredo marionette noir a modern yksniv arts?

Igor? Rogi?

No dice. Then I remember that the lead dancer was Nijinsky, so an earlier result can be repunctuated so that it’s addressed to ‘N.’:

N. redo marionette noir, a modern?

This is barely grammatical, but palindromes can push it much further than poems, and it has some kind of meaning, although I’m not happy that I needed to spell out the connection to Stravinsky.

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