If you thought the "dog"/"god" palindrome was cosmic

All bow before almighty Dog!

... I accept cash, checks, and DVDs. No credit.

That was in a NYTimes crossword puzzle a few months ago...which affirms its brilliance (all bow to the mighty Will Shortz). Less amusingly, it also anagrams to "Best in Prayers."

Evangelist: Evil's agent

Palindrome? Perhaps you mean anagram

an-a-gram - A word or phrase formed by reordering the letters of another word or phrase, such as satin to stain.

Episcopal spells Pepsi Cola.

Well it couldn't have just evolved, could it? So we know there's a designer somewhere, and quite obviously He smiles on Britney. We knew that already, though.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/b8ykm

Does anyone think anagrams actually mean anything?

And what's with criminal masterminds / conspiratorial overlords in books and movies always encoding their plans into anagrams? Did this particular meme come from anywhere besides lazy writers unable to grasp real deductive reasoning?

I think just to contemplate the anagram of something you've got to be a little OCD or catastrophically bored.

Or stoned out of your skull. Oh, those youthful conversations with my dope fiend friends!

"Evolution" makes:
Love in out (well, that makes sense, for mammals at least),
Love I unto,
Outlive on,
Olive unto,
Unveil too,
Live on out,
Novel I out,

and this is kinda creepy:
Vote oil UN.

I wonder if anyone has searched for mentions of Charles Darwin and evolution by utlizing that popular hoax, the Bible Code. I'll bet that Darwin's in there, if people look hard enough!

Or stoned out of your skull. Oh, those youthful conversations with my dope fiend friends!

Palindrome is an anagram for marlin dope.

Is there a specific term for pairs of words formed by spelling one or the other backwards?

Ah, for the days when "Spiro Agnew" spelled out "Grow A Penis."

Is there a specific term for pairs of words formed by spelling one or the other backwards?

You mean, like how zort spells out troz in the mirror?

[i]Is there a specific term for pairs of words formed by spelling one or the other backwards?[/i]

You mean like "Evil spelled backwards is live"? Yeah, that's a palindrome.

So PZ's title is perfectly correct in labelling god | dog a palindrome, even if the article refers to an anagram. [/pedant]

Well Michael Hanscom is nicely gift-wrapped, but I think my mind can cope with that on the whole.

No, a palindrome is something that reads the same forwards and backwards. Like "dad". Or "Rise to vote, sir."

Palindrome isn't one word spelled backwards to spell another (god/dog), it's a word or phrase that spells the same thing when spelled backwards.

Ex:
bob
eve
able was I ere I saw elba
satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas

In response to Lee's question: back in the sixteenth century or so, scientists like Hooke and Galileo sometimes encrypted their findings in anagrams to establish their priority without revealing anything.

Here's a link to the Internet Anagram Server (a term that can be converted to "I, rearrangement servant":
http://wordsmith.org/anagram/
It's one of the services at the "A Word a Day" site, and will generate all of the anagrams based on real words for any word or phrase.

Oh bugger, you're right.

Ah, here we go! It's a semordnilap!

Ok, perhaps a semi-palindrome, anadrome or a reverse anagram, but semordnilap sounds much more fun. :)

It is the perfect world for the psychotic. Finding codes everywhere. I thought that with the Bible Code we had enough.

"I wonder if anyone has searched for mentions of Charles Darwin and evolution by utlizing that popular hoax, the Bible Code. I'll bet that Darwin's in there, if people look hard enough!"

Well, Mel Gibson is mentioned in there, why not Darwin?

Whatever its proper name, my personal favorite is:
"A man, a plan, a canal, Panama"

Child's play! This version was (so I read on the web, so it must be true!) written by Guy Steele in 1983. It's my favorite:

A man, a plan, a canoe, pasta, heros, rajahs, a coloratura, maps, snipe, percale, macaroni, a gag, a banana bag, a tan, a tag, a banana bag again (or a camel), a crepe, pins, Spam, a rut, a Rolo, cash, a jar, sore hats, a peon, a canal. Panama!

"Palindrome is an anagram for marlin dope."

But the best dope you'll find is actually made of tuna.

Too late. My mind was sufficently blown by listening to NPR this morning where Libby Lewis was reporting on Lewis Libby.

Well, I can't find any specific link to it, except for one reply in a Talk Origins comment area and a few book reviews making the same claim, but accoring to Ken Harding in that comment section, "And the so-called bible codes are thouroughly explained and debunked at Hidden Messages and The Bible Code and Bible-Code Developments. It's interesting to note that the phrase "Darwin was right" was also discovered using the bible code."

Though I like the other one I came across looking for this, where a blogger commented on his pointing out that some coincidences of 19 that happen in a Koran, which his sister mentioned, also appear in the Unibomber Manifesto, and telling his sister, "Does this mean they can say, 'even there is the truth?'" lol

Ah, perhaps someone here will know the word I'm looking for. What's the name of the device where you spell out a message with the first letters of sentences? Like you write an email where the first letters of each sentence spell out F.U.C.K.Y.O.U. Then you go back and make the first sentence read something like "First of all, ...". The second sentence is something like "Under no circumstances...", third "Considering...", and so on, until every letter has a corresponding sentence.

Is steganography the right word for that, or is there a more accurate word?

(True story) Charles Darwin was extremely embarrassed by his flatulence, which was one of the symptoms of his mysterious illness.

An anagram of 'Charles Robert Darwin' is 'rectal winds abhorrer'.

Britney Spears was a spokesperson for Pepsi Cola, which is also an anagram of "episcopal." Coincidence? I think not!

Ah, perhaps someone here will know the word I'm looking for. What's the name of the device where you spell out a message with the first letters of sentences?

An acrostic.

BTW, my favorite palindrome comes from the Reagan era and is "Wonder if Sununu's fired now."

"Does anyone think anagrams actually mean anything?"

Lee, apparently the human brain is natively capable of dealing with them, based most likely on the same function that allows it to decode flipped visual images.

There's a computer application for generating web pages called 'Joomla,' and as a joke, when you first install it the default data front page text is garbled English except for the first and last letter of each word.

Similar to the way your brain fills in most of any object you've seen many times before based on familiar visual cues (which probably saves processing labor), it will automatically adjust words (not just their spellings, but the words themselves) into context.

Chances are that people's "Wow" response to anagrams and numerology (like the revived interest in Kabbalah) are similar to older cultural investments in alchemy and astrology. They're clumsy first attempts at organizing phenomena before they are fully understood. In the case of anagrams, my best guess is that the function will prove to be an echo of the random nerve signal response to light that would have to have existed prior to the adaptive development of actual vision. I've always pictured the evolution of vision as being a back and forth process between the eye's ability to encode light cues and the brain's ability to decode them, and I'm stubbornly sticking with conjecture until science comes a long and disproves it.

I found the text:

"Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe."

So I'm guessing anagrams are probably only meaningful to us as possible hints to a causal description of the eye's evolutionary path. To anyone ignorant of Clarke's Third Law, though, they're witchcraft.

Thanks, Nullifidian!

By the way, this business about texts "garbled except the first and last letter" remaining legible was a monumentally clever hoax. If you look closely at the examples, you find that they are very artfully rearranged. A computer program that really scrambles interior letters produces gibberish that only an anagrammist could love.