h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Sums are not set as a test on Erasmus
A man, a plan, a canal: Panama
Pull up if I pull up

Was it a car or a cat I saw?

Satan oscillate my metallic sonatas!

Madam in Eden, I'm Adam

ROTAS
OPERA
TENET
AREPO
SATOR

A particularly clever Latin one, which reads the same up, down left and right. I forget how it translates, but it has something to do with wheels holding stuff...

Georges Perec, a French author, once wrote a palindrome which was over 5000 letters long. He also wrote a novel without using the letter 'e'. Both in French obviously.

You've got it upside down

SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS

Arepo, the sower (sator), holds (tenet) the wheels (rotas) carefully (opera).

That one is an early Christian word square and the letters can be moved around to make a cross which says
(it's going to take some playing for this to format okay, and if it doesn't, just pretend, for my sake, hey?)

.................O
.................P
.................A
.................T
.................E
.................R
OPATERNOSTERA
.................O
.................S
.................T
.................E
.................R
.................A

Pater Noster meaning Our Father

Is there any explanation for the O and the A?

leftovers?

I don't think there is, though I could be wrong. Based on my rudimentary knowledge of Latin, it would be possible to force an explanation... The O can be used as in "Oh God" in a prayer. Ad is "to" and A could possibly be a shortening for that. Poetically, word order can be changed around quite happily so it could go to "oh to our father." However a proper Latin scholar might disagree.

Actually, "a" would be a shortening of "ab", which is from. Thing is, if they'd been the other way around, I might have thought it was for "alpha" and "omega", sometimes used to represent Christ.

Well they could be the other way round, but I remember them being that way round.

I'd have thought, poetically, "a" could be either "ab" or "ad" and the poet would have known from context and possibly the word endings of other words.

*shrug* I'm not a Latin scholar, though.

Oh, hang on. You're right - they do take different endings. My only Latin was to GCSE, so it's possible there was a usage I don't know about.

Mine too, sort of. For Gen Studies A level, my language was Latin. See, I wanted to do AS latin but the person doing Alevel latin was just doing pure and stats maths but Iwas doing physics so doing pure and mechanics maths, so I couldn't do AS latin. Did further maths instead.

My bf however did latin A level...
he says it might be possible to have nostera as a poetic form ... but out of discussion that would then shorten to nostra and be female...

Could well be just spares.