Word: elba
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...read about. The ideal subject of a biography is someone who has succeeded at something, but at a pretty stiff price; the story of such a person inspires both envy ("I could not wage war on most of Europe") and the soothing balm of pity ("What a wretched place Elba must have been"). Yet there are some rare souls on whom fortune constantly grins. Their set-backs turn out to be short outs to triumph; their disappointments in love prepare them for the mate of their dreams. Money, fame, the respect of peers and the warmth of friends, all pursue...
...flashiest section of Kim's text is his discussion of the linguistic equivalent of the calligraphic inversion--the palindrome, a word or sentence that reads the same backwards and forwards. Starting with the most familiar type of palindrome, at the letter-level ("Able was I ere I saw Elba" is the best known of these), Kim goes on to write about word-palindromes (his example is "So patient a doctor to doctor a patient so") and, most fascinating of all, phonetic palindromes, which sound the same run backwards through a tape-recorder ("we revere you" and "ominous cinema...