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If this is true, then the palindrome can be considered poetry based solely on the merits of its formal play. A palindrome embodies the rigor of the chisel—the way you flake it into being, one letter at a time, with the care of a whole hand’s weight. But it is capable of even more than this. Wordplay poetry (or “logological” poetry, as some tight-knit groups of palindromists and anagrammists sometimes refer to it) can give us more than just the pleasure of mechanical skill. It can touch the heart.

The article proposes a generational reading of a series of biographical interviews with eight of the most significant authors of Ibero-American 'youthology'. We are referring to two precursors –Jesús Martín-Barbero and Néstor García Canclini– and six members of the first generation of youth researchers: José Antonio Pérez Islas, Rossana Reguillo, José Manuel Valenzuela, Sergio Balardini, Carlos Mario Perea and Ernesto Rodríguez. We call them \"98' generation\" because the founding \"moment\" of the group was a meeting organized by the Mexican Youth Institute in 1998 in Ixtapan de la Sal – although there is also a play on words with the Spanish literary generation of 1898, which portrayed the end of the colonial empire. In some way it is, then, a generational manifesto.

This paper presents the 'Anthroposcenic' as a geographical contribution to debates around the Anthropocene, deploying the insights of cultural and historical geography to ask how thinking through landscape and time might shape understanding. The paper begins by elaborating on the term 'Anthroposcenic', foregrounding the ways in which landscape becomes emblematic of environmental transformation, and reflects further on geological wordplay in science and the humanities. The role of historical enquiry in addressing the times of the Anthropocene is considered, in terms of the dating of a proposed Anthropocene epoch, and the resonance of past geological debate. The possibilities of the Anthroposcenic are then demonstrated through studies of eroding coastal landscapes, drawing on contemporary and historical material from the English coast. Landscape here becomes emblematic of the Anthropocene, and shows how processes of environmental change are articulated through different geographical scales. Coastal studies also show past landscape achieving present resonance, and thereby how the Anthroposcenic may encompass historical material anticipatory of current debate. The paper reflects too on the ways in which questions of inheritance may frame Anthroposcenic enquiry. A specific Anthroposcene serves to open and close the paper.

Here in A Simple Story, Tsirl Hurvitz, Hirshl's overbearing Jewish mother, stands between him and Blume, a girl beneath the family's aspired-to station; in Bidmi yameha (In the Prime of Her Life) an unhappy arranged marriage with Mr. Mintz blocks Leah from Akavia Mazal. In the felicitous wordplay of Nitza Ben-Dov, Agnonic love stories depict ahavot lo me'usharot, the title of her important book on the subject, the double meaning of which transmits both unhappy as well as unsanctioned love.4 This is not unrequited love, but misaligned relationship- separated by time, location, condition, or class. While some rabbinic texts assert that Akiva's opinion ultimately prevailed because of the ascribed authorship of the song to King Solomon (Seder Olam Rabbah 15), others could reconcile themselves to the song only by opting for an allegorical reading that subverts and supersedes the plain reading (peshat), according to which the book simply celebrates romantic and sexual love (most famously articulated in Rashi's commentary to Song of Songs). If the midrashic (and kabbalistic) meaning of Song of Songs shows the Israelite attempt to repair the breach of exile by delivering the Shekhinah from the diaspora and attaining the lost cosmic harmony through the reunion in the \"marital bed\" as represented by the Temple in Jerusalem, it is not a farfetched reading to understand a story like \"Agunot\"-whose plot plays out in a misaligned love triangle in Jerusalem, with a woman caught between suitors who represent Jerusalem Jewry and the alter heym (old, Eastern European home) but unsuccessful in forming a bond with either-as a repurposing of the template fixed in the Song.6 (This Zionistic eros also serves as an undercurrent in other stories of that period treated in this special issue of Prooftexts, such as \"Leilot\" and \"Ah. ot\" as well as the important story \"Givat hah. ol.\")

In an article published in this journal more than thirty years ago, Raphael Jospe argued (citing an oral tradition that he traced back to Mordechai Kaplan) that the term regel in the famed talmudic narrative about a gentile who approached Shammas and Hillel desiring to be taught the entire Torah \"on one regel\" is intended as a bilingual pun. Jospe supported Kaplan's argument, demonstrating its likelihood as well as its ramifications, and added several circumstantial and contextual considerations, which need not be repeated in detail. This brief note adds two tentative pieces of evidence pertaining to wordplay in the narrative that are not found in Jospe's article--one based on a textual variant, the other on close attention to the proselyte's choice of words. The two new pieces of evidence are not dependent on Jospe's theory and are worthy of consideration in their own right even if Kaplan's insight is rejected as unlikely.

In addition to the acrostic–telestic combination natu ceu aes ‘from birth like bronze’, Catullus poem 60 contains the earliest attested Latin mesostic (mi pia ‘dutiful to me’), which runs down its caesuras. The use of pius anticipates the language of aristocratic obligation that is used of Lesbia in the epigrams and is perhaps also a wordplay on the praenomen of Clodia’s father, Appius. The complex acrostics and the syntax of mi pia, along with the setting of poem 59 (in sepulcretis), suggest that poem 60 can be read as a literary epitaph. Additional closural elements in the poem include an allusion to Callimachus and a sphragis in the form of a play on the author’s name.

This article argues that Caesar puns on the cognomen of Pompey the Great through his use of the adjective magnus at least twice in his Bellum Civile. In each instance, the wordplay contributes to (1) evoking the memory of Pompey's past triumphs and (2) exploring the gulf between past reputation and present reality. By focussing on this particular wordplay, the article contributes to a wider discussion of Caesarean language and wit as well as to studies of Caesar's art of characterization.

This article argues that Virgil includes an allusion to the fourth-century censor Appius Claudius Caecus in Book 8 of the Aeneid. Three pieces of evidence point to this allusion: (1) wordplay, especially the near echo of ‘Caecus’ in ‘Cacus’; (2) semantic associations between Cacus and darkness; and (3) repeated references to sight and Cacus’ eyes. By invoking the memory of Appius, whose blinding in 312 b.c.e. allegedly came at the hands of Hercules as punishment for transferring control of the god's rites at the Ara Maxima to the state, Virgil underscores the importance of properly observing religious rituals. This aligns with Evander's original intent with the Hercules–Cacus story to prove to Aeneas and the Trojans that the Arcadians’ religious practices are no uana superstitio (8.187).

Virgil has Evander trace the origins of the name of the river Tiber back to the death of a giant, called ‘Thybris’ (Aen. 8.330–2). This article argues that the reference to the violent (asper) giant can be understood as etymological wordplay on the Greek word hubris and as a potential allusion to the grammatical debate on the nature of aspiration. Varro's De gente populi Romani is identified as an important source for the characterization of the Tiber as a giant in primeval times. The political implications of the word hubris are also briefly explored with reference to various identities to which Evander alludes. The final part of the article argues that Theocritus’ Idyll 1 and the scholiast to Theocritus may have also inspired Virgil's description of the Tiber in this passage.

In this paper, I aim to discuss what puns, metaphysically, are. I argue that the type-token view of words leads to an indeterminacy problem when we consider puns. I then outline an alternative account of puns, based on recent nominalist views of words, that does not suffer from this indeterminacy.