Saturday, April 28, 2007

Dalinprowes

Palindromes, as any puzzle geek can tell you, are phrases with a letter sequence that when reversed,like many puzzle geeks themselves, stubbornly refuse to change.

I think there is a heavy visual component to the way people think about palindromes. Just look at Kubric's film adaptation of the Stephen King novel The Shining.

Sometimes I consider a construct like palindromes, but instead of picturing a phrase with a line of reflection in the middle of it, i imagine a phrase that looks the same when you rotate it 180 degrees about its center. I can't be sure if this is uncharted territory in useless letter manipulations.

There's got to be some rules here. What happens when you rotate the letter 'e' for example? Does this make an 'a'? It might seem arbitrary to you but I think despite the the extra serif letter a it is still more or less just the rotated figure of the e. Basically, I tried to follow this rule: for either upper or lower case, there exists a common style of typeface where the two letters are identical if you rotate one 180 degrees. Some might object to a rotated T being a T but I think a tall cross is taken for a t in handwritting and probably some font.

If the phrase has an odd number of letters the middle letter should be an invariant (H, I, O, L, S, T, or Z).

Here's my complete alphabet:


AE
B
C
DP
EA
F
G
HH
II
J
K
LL
MW
NU
OO
PD
Q
R
SS
TT
UN
V
WM
XX
Y
ZZ


Some phrases:
seas
wow mom
dad's pep
plow mold
ale n' bbq quale [sic]
llama tote well

Personally, I don't find it very easy to think of these things. Please share if you have of any good ones.

[Puzzle II.I] In particular, can you think of such a phrase to answer these:
Penance the carpenter performed after confessing to overcharging? (8 letters)
Mermaids' proclaimation of luminance? (15 letters)
Preference for Monday (abr.)? (7 letters)

1 comment:

Marty Tiniz said...

I got some feedback about what I called 'dalinprowes' on the newsgroup rec.puzzles. Some one pointed out the things I was claiming to invent were sorta kinda like Ambigrams(see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambigrams).

Although I would hasten to observe that these Ambigrams things, as well as I can tell, are purely visual. The things I was discussing are more like palindromes in that they simply pertain to letters relating to letters in a phrase. Once the relationship between the letters is established it no longer matters about white space, or upper lower case, or punctiation.