Radar Words

I've stumbled on set of small but charming words that I felt just needed to be passed along. I call them "radar words" because I happened to be mulling over the shape of their namesake:

radar

It's a familiar word; practically an everyday word, but what we almost never notice is that it's a palindrome as well: run it backwards and it still spells "radar". Once you see it, you see it — that is, you can see the word as a symmetrical shape, rising from a quiet start to that central "d" and then falling again. An elegant little word, with an elegance in just five letters that slips beneath our notice. Part of its grace comes from it economy. Shorter, and it would be trivial; longer, too artificial. But the five-letter pattern has an almost musical variety to it: a leading consonant that serves as departure and return, a central consonant that's a contrapuntal hinge, and a ruling vowel to connect them. That's the way radar works, too: it's sent out to an object and echoes back to its origin. An elegant word in all ways.

From here it's easy to find more. Change the consonant bookends to get:

madam

That's a famous one, but still handsome to the eye, and beguilingly common for a word with such a gratifying property. Have some more:

refer
rotor
solos
sexes
civic
kayak

Again, very common words whose symmetry doesn't usually catch our attention. In fact, of all the radar words, I can find only one that's rarely used, "minim", and even it's hardly récherché.

Any others, you're wondering? In fact, if you exclude the rather awkward "dewed", I've found exactly 11 radar words, a number that seems somehow preordained. Of the two remaining, one is "tenet". (It joins "kayak" as one of the few words whose outer letters ascend rather than remain level.) The eleventh I leave to the pleasure of your discovery. It's a simple word, not unlike "eleven", and just as attractively symmetric as the other radar words.

Ode to the Smell of Wood

Pablo Neruda's later poems are spare creations that do not turn on lush words or startling ideas, but subtle patterns of nuance and sound. Their pace is slow, and their rhythm therefor essential.

I picked up an excellent new translation of his poems that is wonderful to read, but gets heavy-handed at times. I made this retranslation by hewing very close to the original, choosing vivid words only when they're called for, and letting the sounds of the words and the structure do most of the work.

Maslow in the Checkout Line

The checkout line at the grocery store has evolved over time from its earliest role as a mere supplier of last-minute candy. It still serves that original purpose, but it now does double duty as a magazine rack and miniature library, perhaps on the theory that standing in line is the only place where customers linger long enough to read. For the most part the titles here are candy, too, of the literary sort, and the psychological tone of the checkout line has held steady at the level of quick thrills.

Hans Bethe

Hans Bethe passed away last month, last of the living legends of modern physics. He was 98, professor emeritus at Cornell, and still publishing new work. He was born into the greatest age of physics since Newton, just as it began, in 1906, a year after Einstein's paper on special relativity was published. He lived through the three great theoretical upheavals of the 20th century — relativity, atomic physics, and quantum mechanics — not as a spectator, but as an instrumental force. It is not only his accomplishments that bear remembering, but the phenomenon that he represented: he was a personal link between the great physicists who laid the modern foundations of this science, the memorable figures who developed it in the middle of the century, and the theoreticians carrying it forward today. It was all there, housed in one mind, both inventing physics and conveying it across three generations. He was both bridge and steersman of the science that defines our day.

Sonoluminescence

We're rarely reminded that everyday matter is made of atoms bound tightly to one another by their charged electrons. Slicing bread doesn't feel like splitting atoms, or driving a wedge between the electric forces of molecules. Slicing bread isn't, in fact, splitting atoms; though the drag on the knife as it moves is the ghostly grip of displaced electrons as they redistribute themselves among molecules parting from one another under the blade.

But crack ice or bite a wintergreen Lifesaver, and they will flash with light visible in a darkened room. These are fluorescent lights in miniature, activated by electrons stranded on the wrong side of a broken atomic bond where crystals of water or sugar fracture, then suddenly crossing the microscopic gap to ionize intruding molecules of air, in numbers and force enough to be seen by the unaided eye. It is the subatomic realm reaching up violently to the macroscopic world with no more urging than the mechanical energy that one hand can muster.