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.

John Hunt 2023
Source: uselessetymology.com.
Source: purlandtraining.com.