I fall asleep thinking about the alphabet, filtering through its passages, backwards and forwards, sometimes upside down and as ambigrams. A lifelong mini-OCD form of mental cud-chewing has plagued me since grade school: I must determine the exact center of a word or phrase. In pursuit of this the alphabet dances in my mind.
Sometimes it’s easy. The word PHONE is 5 letters long, and its middle is O. O is a perfect center because it is the same backwards, forwards, and upside down. This is true of O whether it be upper O or lower o, O or o.
TELEPHONE is 9 letters long. Its center is P, an imperfect, off-balance letter that reflects, perhaps, a peculiar characteristic of the lopsidedness of telephonic communication.
The real challenge comes from words with even numbers of letters.
SPRINKLE is 8 letters long. This is an inferior word for it has no single center. We determine this by drilling down between I and N, the center letters of SPRINKLE, to find what lies between. J K L and M lie between I and N, revealing KL as the center. This brings symbolic or simply coincidental attention to the letters KL that linger near the end of SPRINKLE, allowing us to assign those visible letters as the center, even as they are distractingly geographically removed from that position.
We also find meaning in KL as an abbreviation for KILOLITER but not the more familiar KILOGRAM OR KILO, units of measurement used by law enforcement to measure seizures of cocaine, marijuana and other illegal drugs.
.KL is the Top Level Domain for Kington Langley, the magnificent notion/nation-state that claimed the Kingtonian Antarctic Territory, a small portion of Antarctica where 425 scientists populate “7 bases scattered around the territory.” SCATTERED, similar in spirit to SPRINKLE, forms a kinship between the Kingtonian Antarctic Territory’s scientific facilities and law enforcement’s seizure of kiloliters of contraband. This hidden KL at the center and the visible KL at the right end of SPRINKLE makes it obvious that kiloliters of illegal drugs are scattered across Kington Langley’s Antarctic province, perhaps identifying the genuine purpose of those “scientific” bases.
Clearly, SPRINKLE has no center.
The center of SCIENTIFIC is Q.
The center of CENTER is Q.
PROVINCE is centered at a reverse PQ, or QP, a combination which only becomes cosmetically perfect in lower case:
pq
qp
The perfection therein lies in the metaphor of visual opposites and the perfect imperfections of companionship.
RAGING is a perfect word. Its center, between G and I, is a perfect H. H is identical backward and forward, upside down and inside out. With GI as inspiration it is easy to craft further hidden perfect-H words: VAGINA, ANGINA, PUDGIEST, LEGION, etc.
SIGN, conversely, is reverse-perfect, for H is its center but in reverse. This is because I comes before G in SIGN, and a letter’s centrality is only perfect in alphabetically consecutive contexts. Thus, ONLY find its reverse-perfect center at M, TOMB at N, and BOMB at N.
LESSON, LITTER, COFFEE are conflict words, words with seemingly fortified double-centers but which in fact have no center, and no spine. These words are not as strong as they appear, and should be hyphenated.
