Palindromes, Palindromes, Motherfucker, What!

Sometime in the mid-1940s, Leigh Mercer rescued from the trash several thousand index cards that his employer, Rawlplug, had thrown out. Mercer may not have yet had a plan, but he had an idea. He’d grown up in a family that cherished word games and had lived through the birth of the modern crossword puzzle craze, but he’d noticed that no one had seriously set their minds to the problem of palindromes. Though Mercer wasn’t interested in crosswords, he’d acquired a used copy of a book for crossworders that contained lists of words—no definitions—grouped alphabetically and according to length. Using this book and his new stash of recovered index cards, he began copying out possible palindrome centers—any word or snippet of a phrase that might be reversible. In 1946, he came up with one construction: “Plan a canal p.” It was, he himself later admitted, “not very hopeful looking,” but all great plans have to start somewhere.

It took him two years to find Panama.

Mercer has long since been placed in the upper ranks of the great palindromists. Over the years he submitted hundreds of palindromes to the British periodical Notes and Queries, including “Now, Ned, I am a maiden won,” “Nurse, I spy gypsies—run!,” and “Did Hannah say as Hannah did?” But outside the world of word game enthusiasts (a.k.a. logologists), he is largely unknown. This despite being the author of a
seven-word, mostly inaccurate synopsis of a complex engineering feat that became one of the most widely known palindromes in English.

“A man, a plan, a canal, Panama” works well as a palindrome because it’s not only the same letters read backward and forward, but it also makes sense, which is more than many palindromes do. “Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas” is a terrific palindrome, but what does it mean? It’s mostly a string of unlikely, complicated words, a common problem in many otherwise-great palindromes, including another Mercer invention: “Six at party, no pony trap, taxis.”

The Panama palindrome does more than just make sense: it connects a string of nouns that, through association, begins to tell a story—similar to another beloved palindrome: “A dog, a panic, in a pagoda.” Because the mind looks for connections, wanting to make meaning out of nonsense, it pulls together the available clues and reconstitutes them as best it can. Like a haiku, its art lies partly in its brevity. But unlike the pagoda palindrome, the Panama palindrome comes together with a shock of recognition—the sudden delight at the end as a familiar story forms, the word Panama arriving like a punch line.

Good palindromes fascinate because of how they mean,...