The font in Christ’s Chapel
A word about format
Exquisite examples have come down to us from antiquity of incised stelae , upright slabs of stone with letters in scriptio continua , lacking word separation. On decorative copperwork of the early eighteenth century, however, the reader’s understanding is aided by the grouping of letters into individual words, already standard practice well before then. In a palindrome, word break must reverse itself, leading to a re-division of the text into an altered clustering of letters; I try to illustrate this in my final paragraph. Then, too, the ancients for the most part did without punctuation, which today’s sensibilities require. I close withmy two favourite palindromes. In the first instance we could imagine an employee who has had it with delicatessen work and become a cook in an Italian restaurant. Secondly, we might visualize a client protesting to her nutritionist that a regimen isn’t succeeding, and that an alternative is being tried.
Go h\ang a sal\a\mi,\ I’m a las \a\gna h\og.
Doc, note: I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod.
John M. Blakey Professor of Classics, Emeritus Lenoir-Rhyne College Hickory, North Carolina
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