Yarg is a cow’s-milk cheese made in Cornwall that is unique in that it’s wrapped in a layer of nettle leaves before being left to mature. YargĪ woman wrapping yarg cheese in nettles. While many modern words have been suggested as originating from the back-slangers of Victorian England, the only one to definitely survive in current usage is yob, for “boy.” 2.
So a fire was an “erif,” cabbage became “edgabac,” a policeman was a “namesclop,” and a birk was a house (derived from a reversal of “crib”). In 19th century English, back-slang was the name of a popular word-forming technique that created jokey replacements for everyday words by reversing their letters or sounds. And when a mysterious Hungarian aristocrat named Count Alucard turns up in New Orleans in the 1943 film Son of Dracula-well, you can guess what happens next.īesides all the brand names and proper nouns, however, a handful of ananyms and semi-ananyms have backed their way into the dictionary-including the 10 explained here. Fiction writers too often call on ananyms when it comes to inventing characters and settings, like Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (a mangled reversal of nowhere) or Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood (set in the fictional Welsh village of Llareggub, a none-too-subtle reversal of “bugger all”). It’s also a popular source of brand names, like Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions. It’s a technique used to invent everything from place names, like Adanac in Canada and Adaven in Nevada, to first names: the Scots name Segna is thought to have been invented by (mostly) reversing the name Agnes, while Nevaeh, coined by reversing the word heaven, crept into the top 100 girls’ names in America. Words coined by reversing others aren’t quite as rare as they might seem.
That definition makes the word semordnilap a semordnilap itself-but whereas most semordnilaps are little more than sheer coincidence, a word or name that is intentionally invented by reversing another existing word is properly called an ananym. If a palindrome is a word that reads the same backwards as forwards, then a semordnilap is a word that spells out a different word when read backwards, like stressed and desserts, or diaper and repaid.
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