Erin McKean, the Dictionary Evangelist, has a post today on the coinage of the term ygology, meaning the study of palindromes.
Her take is that the word was an inevitability of English, demanding birth. No argument there.
But then she also references ambigrams, which are visual representations of words that are somehow symmetric. If you flip them upside down, they form the same word. Or perhaps the negative space in the word forms another word. Probably the most famous such figure is the cover of the book Gödel, Escher, Bach
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16 October 2007 at 09:52:04
nylusmilk
right now, i’m reading angels and demons by dan brown, of which ambigrams is an important element in the plot. i just find ambigrams really amazing!
16 October 2007 at 11:36:30
Jason Adams
Ah that explains the Angels and Demons ambigram on Langdon’s site.
16 October 2007 at 13:19:05
Melinda Weathers
OOOOO! I am an ambigram! My initials, anyways, when I write them on my Chipotle leftovers, I write them in such a way that they read the same upside-down and right-side-up: MW
16 October 2007 at 20:19:31
nylusmilk
of course, seeing that he’s the one who designed all the ambigrams for the book. ;)