Nate bit a Tibetan

After the last post I decided to research more about palindromes. Check this out! It goes on and on:

The fact is, palindromes are out there in the language, waiting to be dug up. Any wordsmith that starts playing around with the word snore during a sleepless night next to some roaring relative will eventually begin to wonder what words end with erons. It won't be long before herons comes to mind and voila! there's a palindrome: Snore herons.

It's true that there are other things that can be done with herons. Snore doesn't have to come first, but that means finding a word beginning with an h, whose remaining letters must spell something backward. Ham is such a word. And so we find ourselves with the exquisite "Ma, herons snore ham." Though more complex, this too is one of a finite number of herons palindromes. The number of h words that contain another word resting in their posteriors is few. The number of four-word palindromes with "herons snore" as their center could easily be listed on this page. If the palindromist is an artist at all, he's like Michelangelo chiseling at a block of stone to find the human body he already knows is inside.

The above scenario-a sleepless night next to bleating kin-is not a fiction. The event occured early in my palindroming career. I was so delighted with the "Snore herons" that I told everyone about it in the morning. But shortly thereafter I was reading Richard Lederer's Word Circus (in the conventional direction) when I happened upon "Snore herons" in a list of palindromic animals. The pearl of wisdom gleaned from this experience was well worth my disapointment. Palindromes belong to the world, not the individual, and they are continually rediscovered. Imagine my joy when I pried the complete sentence-a rarity among palindromes-"Nate bit a Tibetan" out of the language. Since then I've found it in two other palindrome books.

Sadly, even the best palindromes fail to excite some people. You can imagine that if "Nate bit a Tibetan" sometimes gets a blank stare, "Ma, herons snore ham" can inspire undisguised disgust. The innocent passerby, caught off-guard by an insistent, excited palindromist, can't be expected to understand or appreciate the beauty of such a phrase. The truth is, finding a palindrome is in most cases far more fun than being assaulted with one. If you've spent hours toying with the word "snore" you're bound to be more interested in what it could mean to "snore ham" than those who have spent their time following other pursuits. And so, instead of just perusing the palindromes I and others have excavated from the earth that is the English language, try to build your own. Like any true gourmand, you'll better apreciate the meal when you can recognize the ingredients.