I cannot call to mind any such propria mascula: but I think I can cast a doubt on your correspondent's crotchet.
Surely our civic authorities (not even excepting the Mayor) are veritable males, though sometimes deserving the sobriquet of "old women."
Surveyors, builders, carpenters, and bricklayers are the only persons who use the level.
On board ship, it is the males who professionally attend at the poop.
Our foreign-looking friend rotator, at once suggestive of certain celebrated personages in the lower house, is by termination masculine; and such members, in times of political probation, never fail to show themselves evitative rather than plucky.
But some words are reversible in sense as well as in orthography.
If a man draw "on" me, I should be to blame if at least I did not ward "off" the blow.
Whom should we repel sooner than the leper?
Who will live hereafter, if he be a doer of evil?
We should always seek to deliver him who is being reviled.
Even Shakspeare was aware of the fact, that it is a God who breeds magots in a dead dog (vide Hamlet). "Cum multis aliis."
The art of composing palindromes is one, at least, as instructive as, and closely allied to, that of deciphering.
If any one calls the compositions in question "trash,"
I cannot better answer than in palindrome,
Trash? even interpret Nineveh's art! for the deciphering of the cuneiform character is both a respectable and a useful exercise of ingenuity.
The English language, however, is not susceptible of any great amount of palindromic compositions.
The Latin is, of all, the best adapted for that fancy.
I append an inscription for a hospital, which is a paraphrase of a verse in the Psalms:
"Acide me malo, sed non desola me, medica."
I doubt whether such compositions should ever be characterised by the term sotadic. Sotadic verses were, I believe, restricted to indecent love-songs.
C. Mansfield Ingleby.
Birmingham.
Notes and Queries, Number 207, October 15. 1853.
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