Palindromes

No, a palindrome is not a place where controversial American politician Sarah Palin parks her private jet in her home state Alaska.

A palindrome is something -- usually a word, letter or number -- that can be read the same way in either direction (punctuations, capitalisations and spacings are allowed). Some common palindromic words are: civic, radar, level, racecar and redder.

But, from my own recollection, the two most famous palindromes are:
A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!
Able was I ere I saw Elba [apparently spoken by Napoleon, following his defeat in battle, when he saw the island the British had exiled him to].

Other clever palindromes include:
Madam, I'm Adam.
Was it a rat I saw?
Step on no pets.
Dammit, I'm mad!

You can cage a swallow, can't you, but you can't swallow a cage, can you? [this one is a special form, where the whole word is reversed, not the letters.]

If your name is "Mike Kim", it's palindromic. Among the ethnic Indian community here are people from Malayalam. That's a palindrome.

There are palindromic numbers too. One this year is 11/02/2011.

And if, by now, you have developed a fear of palindromes, there's a palindromic term for it: Aibohphobia!

Postscript: To round off my two earlier postings, there is something called the "pangram". This is a sentence using every letter of the alphabet (English in my examples) at least once. The best known is "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." There is at least another: "How quickly daft jumping zebras vex!"