Subject
Nikto Botkin (fear of palindromes)
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Dear Victor Fet:
I coined the word 'aibohphobia' (fear of palindromes).
Napoleon was aibohphobic. What he actually said was 'Able was I ere I
saw St
Helena!'
Very minor nit-pick. Palindromologists reserve the term 'perfect' for
those
strings which are strictly reversible using _every_ character,
ignoring
upper/lower case but including spaces and punctuation. Thus 'radar'
and
'Radar' are 'perfect' but 'Nikto Botkin' slightly less than 'perfect'
because of the position of the space. 'Madam I'm Adam' is even less
'perfect.' Of course, the more interesting palindromes are IMperfect.
The
record palindrome when I last wrote on the subject (UNIX Review Nov
1994)
ran to many pages, and was, in theory, indefinitely extensible using
an
algorithm devised by Dan Hooey, Steve Smith and Guy Jacobson. It
starts
'A man, a plan, a caret, a ban, a myriad ...' and ends with 'a
dairyman, a
bater, a canal -- Panama.' You can see it's derived from the classic 'A
man,
a plan, a canal -- Panama' by stuffing the right stuff in the middle
--
regardless of good sense.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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I coined the word 'aibohphobia' (fear of palindromes).
Napoleon was aibohphobic. What he actually said was 'Able was I ere I
saw St
Helena!'
Very minor nit-pick. Palindromologists reserve the term 'perfect' for
those
strings which are strictly reversible using _every_ character,
ignoring
upper/lower case but including spaces and punctuation. Thus 'radar'
and
'Radar' are 'perfect' but 'Nikto Botkin' slightly less than 'perfect'
because of the position of the space. 'Madam I'm Adam' is even less
'perfect.' Of course, the more interesting palindromes are IMperfect.
The
record palindrome when I last wrote on the subject (UNIX Review Nov
1994)
ran to many pages, and was, in theory, indefinitely extensible using
an
algorithm devised by Dan Hooey, Steve Smith and Guy Jacobson. It
starts
'A man, a plan, a caret, a ban, a myriad ...' and ends with 'a
dairyman, a
bater, a canal -- Panama.' You can see it's derived from the classic 'A
man,
a plan, a canal -- Panama' by stuffing the right stuff in the middle
--
regardless of good sense.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm