Aha!
That, my friends, is the shortest palindrome in the English language, and a fine way to greet this new, palindromic year of 2002.
Forward, backward it reads the same. It's a mirror image of itself, offering a pleasing sense of symmetry and the solid assurance that the end will resemble the beginning.
Avid as a diva.
Mathematicians rejoice in such numeric beauty, and in the way it offers concrete proof of the logic of numbers, something that surely eludes most of their students.
Puzzlers like the challenge of it all and relish the chance to create ever-longer palindromic words and sentences. Perhaps nothing in English will be able to compete with saippuakauppias, the 15-letter Finnish word that stands for "soap seller" whichever way you read it.
But in English, we do have Wassamassaw, a swamp north of Charleston, S.C. The name comes from a Native American word for "the worst place ever seen," which explains why it's never quite become a tourist attraction.
And someone named Penelope Gilliatt created a 51-letter palindrome that has the rare quality of being vaguely understandable:
Doc, note I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod.
Me, I eat salad, alas.
I also wonder about the significance of this numeric oddity, this perfectly symmetrical year. We are told that this is a propitious time, because only at the turn of the millennium are there two palindrome years within an ordinary human life-span.
And there are some striking similarities to 1991. Then as now, a Bush named George was in the White House. A guy named Cheney worked for him, although in '91 he actually was seen in public more than once a month.
The United States was fighting in a war to liberate a heretofore little-noticed nation where women were covered head-to-toe and where democracy was as alien as a bikini. Unemployment rose, banks failed, the airline industry went into a nosedive and health-care costs zoomed.
And Julia Roberts was voted a Young Hero of America.
Tattarrattat.
But a palindrome is not a comparison. It is a self-contained cycle, a journey back home. There may be some comfort in imagining that 2002 will end as it began with the clarity of a winter sky, the warmth of good cheer, and the hope that this last annus horribilis will not soon be repeated.
Human optimism, though, requires more. It demands a belief in the possibility of progress, that for most of us, life at the end of one year will be a little better than it was in the beginning. The bumpy journey of human development is not a straight path, true, but it has a direction.
We don't want our lives to be like palindromes and peak in the middle. (Although Shakespeare did point out that old age is like infancy, in that we are "sans teeth, sans hair, sans eyes, sans every thing.")
Think back to this date in 1991 for a moment. The Soviet Union was on life support. Apartheid retained its nasty grip on South Africa. Race riots would soon tear at the heart of Los Angeles.
There's been some progress, yes?
Not so, Boston! someone moaned after the Boston Red Sox ignominiously lost the 1986 World Series.
Fortunately, Philadelphia doesn't lend itself to backward reading. But as we begin this year of promise and palindromy, let's enjoy the wordplay, acknowledge the mathematical specialness, and vow to end 2002 in an even kinder, gentler place.
Yo.
Oy.
Happy New Year.
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