Art as Palindrome

There is beauty in symmetry; so saith both experience and science, which attempts to explain why we find symmetrical faces more attractive.

Some artists have taken that a step further, creating not just symmetrical portraits or depictions of symmetric things -- Salvador Dali's Santiago El Grande being a great example -- but completely symmetrical paintings, such as Barnett Newman's Onement I. Some have taken forays into self-conscious symmetry. Aesthetics are often better served with almost perfect symmetry, which M.C. Escher used to great effect, but it's an interesting exercise in using science to further art. (How often do you hear that happening?)

The recent post about Palindrome as Art got me thinking about symmetry in language, specifically on the subject of ambigrams. Ambigrams are an interesting variation on palindromes: words or phrases written in such a way that they read the same when turned upside down. For example,

MOW

is an ambigram (using some fonts). A more interesting ambigram, and the earliest reference I could find to an ambigram, is the word "chump" written in cursive:

This is a more interesting variation, because as you can see, there is not a one-to-one correlation of one letter turning into another when turned upside-down. The c and h together become the p and the end of the m, and in fact, except for the c, each letter becomes part of two letters.

The modern ambigram uses distortion to create an ambigram. In this way, an 'a' can become an 'e' or even an 'o'. Another "trick" is to have seemingly superfluous marks that are ignored by the eye when read one way, but are noticed as being part of the letters when read the other way. Look at happy holiday for extraneous marks and happy birthday for distortion (although they both use both techniques).



In fact, using distortion one can make an ambigram out of virtually any combination of letters, although it's often so distorted that you can't decipher the ambigram without knowing what it's supposed to say. However, good ambigrams give the reader other cues, visual or otherwise, to assist in deciphering.

But I find the simplest and most pure (i.e., least unnecessary extra letter pieces) ambigrams the most aesthetically pleasing. Pure symmetry alone is not the answer. John Langdon's book on ambigrams is an excellent collection of ambigrams made by the author, and I suggest at the least you take a look at the cover. "Wordplay" as an ambigram delights me on multiple levels.

To return to the topic back to symmetry in art, why is it that certain asymmetry is also desired? Dali's paintings, Escher's drawings, even John Langdon's "Joy to You" are not perfectly symmetrical. Slight variation keeps the pictures from being too mechanical, too artificial. So despite scientific proof of our preference for symmetry, true artists know how to use asymmetry as well to create an aesthetically pleasing picture.

Sui Generis Expressions

Groundhog Day: Quick, what's the first idea that comes to mind? It's February, so it's possible that it's Punxsutawney Phil and an implausibly unironic highfalute of Gobbler's Nob village elders in top hats. (I propose "highfalute" as the collective noun for village elders in bombastic headgear.) If you're from New England there's an outside chance it's a quahog predicting the weather before being frittered. But most of the time, for most people, it's an experience of being trapped in a mundane, repeating cycle. That may be accompanied by visions of Bill Murray's sad-sack newsman repeatedly waking up at 6:00 AM to cover the same soul-crushing story and eventually trying to kill himself before turning his life around and triumphantly sleeping with Andie MacDowell.  But what's interesting is that there's a good chance it's not.

Every now and then, a bit of pop culture so embeds itself in the collective consciousness that it creates a concept that persists independent of the source material. "Groundhog Day" is such a concept. The monotony of daily life for many people is a phenomenon that needed a pithy term to encompass it, and "groundhog day" fits the bill. One day, perhaps not too far off -- the kids born when the movie came out are applying to college -- people will be using the term in this sense without any idea where it came from.

Your intrepid bloggers have come up with a few other examples of this phenomenon, but we trust that our distinguished readers will come up with many others, and we invite you to share.

• Bucket list - Another term that brings pith to a somewhat familiar idea, "list of things to do before you die." This will probably be a part of the general lexicon without any association to the movie faster than groundhog day because the term evokes the idea directly, rather than by way of the source material.
• White whale - This phrase may never be truly divorced from Moby Dick, particularly because its users tend to be erudite enough to know where it comes from, but as a term for a self-destructive obsession it has a place in the language.
• Albatross - More likely to be used without consciousness of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to describe a self-created curse or affliction with a karmic dimension.

Please, dear readers, offer up your suggestions to add to the list.

Word Play for Fun -- and Credit!

I was delighted to read in the February 3 Princeton Alumni Weekly magazine about a freshman seminar called "Wordplay: A Wry Plod from Babel to Scrabble" (by Merrell Noden, link to full article above).  Joshua Katz, Professor of Classics and linguist extraordinaire, leads 15 students in the examination and creation of various types of word play, such as constrained writing.  Examples of constrained writing include palindromes, lipograms, alliteratives, anagrams, and, more commonly, rhyme and meter.  As an example of one of my favorite types of constrained writing, watch this footage of word wizard Victor Borge's Inflationary Language; as far as I know, he invented this grammatical gimmick.

We here at liquidridiculous are jealous that these undergraduate students get to spend 3 hours each week as ludic linguists.  Would that we could have had such opportunities in our misspent youth!  You really must take a moment to appreciate the impressive work these students have done for this class.

To the skeptics out there who find such obsessions frivolous, I have two responses:
1) Why are you reading this blog?  It is a veritable monument to frivolity; and
2) Read the PAW article, especially toward the end, where Prof. Katz discusses the bigger issues at stake in understanding the delightfully complicated ins and outs of language.

There is something universal at work here.  "There is something in all of us, [Katz] says, that craves wordplay. 'That's one of the things that's so interesting about it,' he muses. 'It resonates so seriously with children the world over, [in the form of] puns, oral games, rhymes, and songs.' As we get older, most of us stifle our fascination with it. But these lucky students, with Katz as their guide, are rediscovering the deep and serious pleasure of playing with words."

We couldn't have said it better ourselves.  Keep up the good work.

In the meantime, for the rest of us amateur enthusiasts, the grammatical gauntlet has been thrown down in the form of a "Constrained Writing Contest" sponsored by the PAW Magazine.  Here are the details from their website:

Try your hand at constrained writing and you could win a trio of DVDs for word lovers: “Spellbound,” “Wordplay,” and “Word Wars”!  

Lipograms (banning a particular letter), palindromes (reading the same backward and forward), alliteratives (each word starts with the same letter), anagrams ­(rearranging the letters in a sentence, for example, to create a new sentence) — whatever your puzzle passion, send your example by March 1 to paw@princeton.edu or to “Constrained Writing,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, 194 Nassau St., Suite 38, Princeton, NJ, 08542. We plan to post submissions and announce the winner in the April 7 issue. 

We hope, dear readers, that you'll throw your highbrow hat into this recherche ring.  In other words, bring it on!