2025-03-03
53 分钟You're listening to Away With Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I'm Grant Barrett.
And I'm Martha Barnett.
On our Facebook group,
Teresa Abney posted about her new baby granddaughter who was named after Teresa's late mother.
She writes, my mother's first name was Edna, which she hated, and her middle name was Marie.
In later years, my mother cleverly decided to go by Andy, which was her name spelled backwards.
And Teresa says, I have five sons, two of whom had daughters after my mom's passing,
and both wanted to name their daughter after her.
Do reversals of namespellings happen regularly?
Has it happened to you?
And Grant, there's a word for this kind of thing.
It's an anadrome.
It's a word that forms a different word when spelled backwards.
It's like the word palindrome, but it goes one way rather than both ways.
Right.
So when you talk about names spelled backward, Edna becomes Andy, A-N-D-E,
and I think of Nevea, which was popular for a while, maybe still is.
That's heaven spelled backward.
Oh, yeah.