Civic Deed

© Stik

You have to have a special kind of mind to be good at palindromes. The kind of mind, it seems, that's also good at breaking codes, a mind like those of Alan Turing and his cohorts at Bletchley Park who broke the Nazis' Enigma code (as celebrated in the movie The Imitation Game). Their friendly palindromic rivalry came to light only decades after their more famous achievement. It all started, apparently, when one among them challenged the rest to come up with a better palindrome than "step on no pets." In response, codebreaker Peter Hilton created "sex at noon taxes," and they were off: http://www.vocabulary.com/articles/wc/the-palindrome-game-of-the-enigma-codebreakers/