Madam, I'm Adam
Madam,
I'm Adam
In Brief
Figure of speech. For no apparent reason other than
the fact that Myles Crawford has just mentioned a man from
Cork named Dick Adams, Lenehan bows to an imaginary shape and
says, "Madam, I'm Adam. And Able was I ere I saw Elba." These
are two well-known examples of the palindrome, a word,
phrase, or sentence that reads the same from end to beginning
as it does from beginning to end.
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Palindrome (PAL-in-drome, from Greek palin = again +
dromos = a running) is a "running backward." It can
take the form of a word as simple as Eve (or madam), or a
phrase as ingeniously long as "A man, a plan, a canal:
Panama!" (or "Able was I ere I say Elba," coined to describe
Napoleon after he was exiled to the small Italian island of
Elba). Some Greeks and Romans played with the form in the
centuries before and after Christ, but their term for it was karkinikos
or carcinicos, crab-like writing. The word palindrome
was coined by Henry Peacham (son of the Henry
Peacham whose work on rhetoric is sometimes cited in
these notes), in his 1638 work The Compleat Gentleman.
Palindromes have virtually nothing to do with the rhetorical
tradition, but Stuart Gilbert and Robert
Seidman both include it in their lists of rhetorical
figures in Aeolus. I am following their lead because
it seems possible that Gilbert included the term at Joyce's
urging, and because Joyce included two examples of the device
in a chapter filled to bursting with inventive rhetorical
arrangements of letters and words. His interest in palindromes
was more than casual. In Penelope Molly coins a word
for Blazes Boylan's knocking at her front door––"I was just
beginning to yawn with nerves thinking he was trying to make a
fool of me when I knew his tattarrattat at the
door"––that currently stands as the longest single-word
palindrome in the English language. English has nothing on
Finnish: a person who sells soapstone in that country is
called a saippuakivikauppias.
