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THE MYSTER CHARACTER IN YOUR NOVEL: Setting As A Character

9/30/2022

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You've done character profiles for your hero, heroine, antagonist, and secondary characters. You've plotted your novel. You're ready to go. But wait! Have you overlooked that mystery character?
“Who’s that?” you ask.
“Your setting, of course



PERSONALITY TRAITS OF A GREAT SETTING

The setting grounds your novel in the reality of “place”. Without place, the characters are just there without reason to act or care. Setting is not only the time, location, and circumstance of where the story takes place, but the social milieu which shapes values and the characters. Nathan Bransford sees three important traits of setting in a novel:

● Change Underway
In a good novel, change is underway. The characters are not static and neither is the setting. Otherwise, they would be unchanging places which have no bearing on the lives of the characters or the action in the storyline. The plot should be inherent to the setting. Is the place resisting change or pushing for it? Is it a place in turmoil itself or is it experiencing the tension beneath a calm and cool surface? Is it a passing era with struggling to make way for a new generation or way of life.


● Personality and Values
The era during which the novel takes place has its own value system, but within that context, a great setting has its own values and traits. A contemporary small town could be welcoming and friendly, or it could seemed closed and suspicious of outsiders. Every setting has certain traits rising to the surface, whether it's valor and honor, justice and order, every man for himself, or it could even be a place where normal values and perspectives have become skewed or inverted
.

● Unfamiliarity
Third component of a great setting is the unfamiliarity. The setting should show the reader something they’ve never seen before. Either it's a place that most readers might be unfamiliar with and have never traveled to, or it shows us a place that we are all-too-familiar with, but with a new, fresh perspective that makes us look again."

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       Image Credit: MartinLyle – Metavia.co.uk                     Miry Diamond Mine, Siberia
       
Image source: dailymail.co.uk/The-Lilliput                              Image Source: sun-surfer.com/mirny-diamond-mine
       -thats-just-kaput

WHY YOU NEED A GREAT SETTING
In addition to giving your character a stage upon which to act, a great setting serves the novel in a number of ways, including:

● Provide context and help hook the reader
The setting can serve as a hook or emphasize its power to engage the reader for two reasons. 

First, it is one of the first elements the reader is introduced to in the story. The writing is crucial, since too much detail leads to a loss of focus on the whereas not enough makes it harder for readers to be intrigued in the setting and immerse themselves in your world.
​

Second, once the reader knows a little about the where and when the story is taking place, they begin to create expectations and provides context.

● Depict the theme of your story
One of the primary roles of the setting is to aid the author in depicting the theme of the novel. Setting [i.e. environment] is crucial to the formation of the human personality. You are your memories and much of your memory relates to environment and the people in it.

According to novelist Richard Russo contends that, “The more specific and individual things become, the more universal they feel,” says Russo. This is an example of the principle of a truism, which comes to us in the form of paradox (like all good truisms). He points out that detail provides the color and texture of the novel and helps it resonate with a sense of place.

● Establish the mood
Setting definitely helps establish the overall mood of the story. While this overall mood [e.g. a dark story] may be a particular feeling, not every scene has the same temper. The setting of the individual scenes can set the frame of mind for what will happen one in that particular scene.

Author Susan Meissner writes, "We are wired to assign value to places. That's why home is so sweet, Yosemite is so beautiful, Paris is so romantic and a moonlit beech is so calming. It's also why dark houses scare us, crumbling cliffs intimidate us, and foggy moors depress us. Places communicate something to us. A spider doesn't care if it makes a web in a dark, musty cellar or under a chair in an opulent ballroom. But we care!"
​
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    Yosemite                                                                            Couple walking on beach at sunset
    Image Credit/ source: subscribe.cntraveler.com/                 Image credit:shutterstock.com/video/walking-on-beach
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            Dark creepy house                                                    Foggy Forest
            Image source: pinterest.com/pin/                           Image source: pinterest.com/pin/42502790204908209/
● Aid character developmentCharacters develop from somewhere. Similar to a traveler on a road, characters start in one situation [their normal life] and when something happens [the inciting incident] they move from the starting point through a series of event which lead them through changes in situation and perspective in their lives to the end.

Those events are grounded in time and place and setting necessarily influences the kinds of events that occur to the character and how the character reacts. Mood is often a factor in how someone reacts. Visceral reaction precedes thinking.

● Serve as a character who helps or hinders
Just as any character can help or hinder the protagonist in achieving his or her goal, the setting can accomplish the same goal. For example, in a novel where the protagonist's goal is climbing Mt. Everest, the setting could do everything it can to prevent success with wind, falling rocks, breaking ropes, rain, and so on.

Your setting is definitely a character in your novel. Whether it's a primary or secondary character depends on the kind of novel and what the author wants. But choosing the correct setting is just as important as the other components of the novel. It can assist the reader to experience the drama and feel the moods and emotions of each particular scene, as well as the novel as a whole. If you are writing science fiction, then the setting becomes the entire world.

SELECTING THE SETTING
The original idea for a novel often includes the setting, at least in a general sense, just as it most often would include the time or era [e.g. London in the 1850’s].

Sometimes settings are such that the story couldn't take place anywhere else because of the mood, physical features, social values and customs. That is fortuitous when it happens. Otherwise, the author has to think through when and when the general story idea could take place, then consider the elements listed above and find a setting that works and can add uniqueness to the novel.

You can set a novel in a place you've never been and pull it off, but having been there is better. Physical presence gives you a sense of how the location feels, tastes, and smells. You hear the background sounds, feel the rhythm and pace. These things are often hard to research. Even if you've never been to the location where your novel is set, thinks about those characteristics of place.

While setting may not be the same as mood and atmosphere, the reader's emotional response to the time and place of the setting, each setting has its own unique mood and atmosphere. And the more familiar you are with the sense of place, the more you can use it to assist or hinder your protagonist, which will add depth to your novel.
Doing research in advance allows the author to pull those in as details that affect and further plot without stopping in the middle to look things up, or going back later to add them…and then forgetting to do that.

A few things to look at include: Weather and climate, slang and language, particularly if the setting is foreign, the appearance at different times of day and in different seasons. You may even want to find out of the location is on daylight savings time…and that's not just for the US settings. What places in the setting are particularly scary/dangerous and peaceful/safe, map and satellite pictures, topography and physical characteristics.

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Susan Meissner also suggests, as part of your research, that you look at the location's newspaper on line and check out "real estate ads, the society page, obituaries, and the restaurant guide." You can get a good sense of what the city or town is like.  Personally, I'd throw in reading the police blotter or equivalent, too.

SETTING OF EACH SCENE
I was intrigued by Author MaryLu Tyndall's list of six ways the setting can help or hinder the protagonist in achieving his/her goals in general and in a scene. It's worth the time to read her article. (See Resources) Here's a recap of her points.

● The setting as a friend / a comfortable, relaxing place where protagonist can reflect, or a safe place to hide from enemies.

● The setting as an antagonist / introduce conflict, trouble, thwarts protagonist's plans.

● The setting as a mentor / a place to learn or make discoveries, a place to prepare to take something on.

● The setting as a shadow for protagonist / a shadow reflects the deepest flaws of the character / a setting that opens the character's eyes to his/her own flaws.

● The setting as a model of what the protagonist wants to be / a setting that fosters qualities to which the protagonist aspires.

● The setting as an example / a setting that either assists or hinders the character in the particular scene.


TAKE AWAYS
In summary, here are some suggestions that will help you create vivid, memorable and meaningful settings:::
  • Don’t just “tack” the setting into the novel; make it an integral part of the story.
  • Describe selectively and with purpose—through integration in “scene” rather than exposition
  • Be specific (e.g., soft pink rose, not flower; beat up Chevy, not car; old clapboard cottage, not house)
  • Use similes, metaphors, and personification to breathe life into setting
  • Use the senses like sight, sound, smell, taste, touch.
  • Don’t tell, show [e.g. don’t only say the time is the 1920s; show the cars and dresses. Don’t tell the reader it’s raining; show them by describing the dripping trees, etc.]
  • Compare and contrast settings and relate them to the point of view characters
  • Don’t describe setting all at once in the beginning; work it in slowly throughout the story; let it unfold as the story does.
  • JUST SAYIN’!
    □
  • ​Sources:
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setting_%28narrative%29
    http://www.rachellegardner.com/2012/06/using-setting-as-a-character-a-tip-for-novelists/
    http://www.novelrocket.com/2011/10/make-your-setting-character-by-susan.html
    http://www.julieleto.com/articles/where-am-i-the-importance-of-setting-to-your-romance-novel/
    http://www.scribophile.com/blog/importance-of-setting-in-a-novel/
    http://leaguewriters.blogspot.com/2010/05/making-of-world.html
    http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2010/05/what-makes-great-setting.html
    http://www.saint-petersburg.com/photo/index.asp\
    https://www.scribophile.com/academy/importance-of-setting-in-a-novel
  • ​https://selfpublishingresources.com/how-does-the-setting-contribute-to-the-story/#:~:text=%20A%20story%E2%80%99s%20setting%20can%20help%20to%20advance,3%20Creating%20a%20mood%20and%20atmosphere%20More%20

    Photos
    http://sun-surfer.com/mirny-diamond-mine-siberia-russia-6745.html
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2558813/The-Lilliput-thats-just-kaput-Japanese-theme-park-based-Gullivers-Travels-left-rot.html
    https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-8175769-young-couple-walking-on-beach-sunset
    https://subscribe.cntraveler.com/subscribe/cntraveler/144814?source=msn_sem_control&msclkid=ae2e3a96539b1e5108d558667e618ce4
    https://www.pinterest.com/pin/42502790204908209/
    https://catholicleader.com.au/life/striving-for-peace-and-joy-in-the-family/

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HOW NOT TO SITE A THEME PARK: Gulliver's Kingdom

9/23/2022

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If you haven’t read “Gulliver’s Travels” by Jonathan Swift [1726] you should. It’s an adventure/ satire classic of English literature.
Even if you have heard of the book, you may have never heard of Gulliver’s Kingdom Theme Park, built in Japan. In fact, you easily might have gone through life never hearing it mentioned… except for this blog.

Why? Because the sprawling white elephant existed only for about ten years, and in 2022 there is little of the demolished theme park left to be seen on the land. It exists only in eerie and unsettling photographs taken by the hardy folks who love to explore ruins.

A MOMENT IN HISTORY
In the 1990s, Japan’s government took steps intended to entice Japan out of its economic gloom, including a jobs creation program. Most were constructions projects reminiscent of “the “bridge to nowhere”. Instead, they provided for short-term construction jobs and not much more.
​

Backed financially by the Niigata Chuo Bank to the tune of 350 million American dollars, Gulliver’s Kingdom theme park was completed in 1997. A few years later, when the bank failed because of non-payment of loans, they were ordered to divest themselves of unprofitable ventures such as Gulliver’s Kingdom. The park closed its doors in October of 2001, and the park was left to rot. The aerial photo below was taken by Apollo mapping on April 6, 2002. The site was demolished in 2007.

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  Image credit: Digital Globe Op                                                       Map of Gulliver’s Kingdom theme park
  Image source: apollomapping.com/your                                      Image Credit:  Spechtrograph
​  -imagery-work-break                                                    
Image Source: weburbanist.com/2011/gullivers-kingdom
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The creepy centerpiece of the park was a 147 foot statue (prone) of Gulliver himself being tied to the ground by the miniature Lilliputians, whom he encounters during his first adventure.

​​
◄ View of Gulliver’s kingdom
Image Credit: Martin Lyle

​Image Source: dailymail.co.uk/The-Lilliput-thats-just-kaput

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           Theme park with sparse attendance.
           Source of  Images: weburbanist.com/2011/gullivers-kingdom
  
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       Image Credit: Martin Lyle                                                                   Image Source: 
       Image Source: dailymail.co.uk/The-Lilliput-thats-just-kaput         weburbanist.com/2011/gullivers-kingdom
​

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                Source of Image Sources: weburbanist.com/2011/gullivers-kingdom
WHAT WENT WRONG?
One would think the site of the park had a lot going for it, ensconced in Kamikuishiki village at the foot of Mount Fuji with the dormant, snow-covered volcano rising behind it. At the time when the theme park was only a glimmer in someone’s eye, the natural beauty of the area attracted about twenty-five million tourists per year despite the country’s economic doldrums. Tourists with children want more to do than sit around soaking in magnificent scenery, don’t they?

The story of Gulliver’s travels is one filled with something for everyone, and the action/ adventure of the time Gulliver spent with the tiny Lilliputians is a good enough theme for an amusement park.  So, what went wrong?

For starters, any architect or project planner worth his salt knows to check out the location and the neighbors with a fine-toothed comb before selecting a site. I’d say the people in charge of the project didn’t do their homework.

Despite the beauty of Mount Fuji, the location has a down side. The “dark side” of the volcano descends on the side of the mountain where Kamikuishiki Village is located. This is the Aokigahara area, the home of Japan’s “suicide forest”, the second most popular place in the world to commit suicide. [The most popular being the San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge]


Another unfortunate neighbor, even worse than the “Suicide Forest”, was the headquarters of the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult and their nerve gas production facility. This was the cult that flooded the Tokyo subway with Sarin gas in March of 1995, killing 19 people and injuring 5,500 others. Two days later, a thousand Japanese police in gas masks stormed the cult’s Sarin production compound.
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​People who lived in the village were still complaining about the smell of gas and chemicals in the air three years after the raid, which didn’t sit well the residents or the attendees of the theme park when it opened in 1997.
                                           
Image Credit: Getty Images
                    Image Source: gettyimages.co.jp/Aum-shinrikyo


In addition to opening behind schedule due to the chaos created by the police raid, there were many operational problems. Last, but not least, Gulliver’s Kingdom wasn’t like a traditional theme park with a rollercoaster and other rides that kids like. The closest things to the usual amusement park entertainments were a bobsled track and a luge course – not exactly ideal for the kiddies.

THE DEMISE OF THE KINGDOM
Even the name Gulliver’s Kingdom presaged doom for the park. If it was Gulliver’s Kingdom, what is the star of the show doing securely pegged to the ground by little people 1/12 the size of humans? Some king!

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In the mean time, the park is no more, only a blot on the land slowly being taken back by nature. If it were not for the few photos taken immediately after the park opened, and after it closed, we would never even know what was there.

JUST SAYIN”!□
Sources:
http://haikyo.org/
https://weburbanist.com/2011/06/05/big-in-japan-gullivers-kingdom-abandoned-theme-park/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulliver%27s_Travels
https://www.britannica.com/event/Tokyo-subway-attack-of-1995
https://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/11/02/vbs.suicide.forest/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack
https://firsttoknow.com/gullivers-kingdom-japan/

https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/g77sa6/abandoned_gullivers_kingdom_theme_park_japan/
https://www.gettyimages.co.jp/%E5%86%99%E7%9C%9F/aum-shinrikyo


https://apollomapping.com/blog/your-imagery-work-break-60-cm-quickbird-data-from-gullivers-kingdom-theme-park-japan

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EVERYTHING YOU NEVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT AMBIGRAMS

9/16/2022

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Do you remember Dan Brown’s book "Angels and Demons" (2000), or the movie that followed? Tom Hanks, throughout the movie, used the term “Ambigram”, but it sounded to many like the word “Anagram.” It was later that I found out he meant “ambigram” which, of course, is not the same thing.

WHAT IS AN AMBIGRAM?
An ambigram is a visibly symmetrical word, calligraphic design, art form, or any other type of symbol that retains a certain meaning regardless* of the direction, perspective, or orientation from which it’s viewed. The meaning of the ambigram can either change or stay the same.

The word combines Latin ambiguus [“having double meaning, shifting, changeable, doubtful,"] with gram which is derived from Greek graphein [“to draw, write.”]

EXAMPLES
All examples are rotated by 180 degrees. *I found no visibly symmetrical examples where the picture appears the same from all four directions, i.e. regardless of orientation.


​HISTORY

​● Recent
Artist Peter Newell drew the first ambigrams and included these “invertible illustrations” in his series of “Topsys and Turvys” books starting in 1893. One of his most popular illustrations reads “Puzzle” in one direction and “The End” upside down. Newell is known for the illustrations he created for famous authors like Mark Twain and Lewis Carroll.
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Image credit: Peter Newell, 1893
Image source: ​https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambigram


In the early 1900s, Dutch-American comic artists Gustave Verbeek also used ambigrams in three consecutive strips. According to Wikipedia, “His comics were ambiguous images, made in such a way that one could read the six-panel comic, flip the book and keep reading.”

Four years late, in 1908, British monthly “The Strand Magazine” also published ambigrams drawn by different people.

Indiana professor Douglas Hofstadter and some of his friends coined the word ambigram in the 1980s and introduced what might be called today’s modern ambigram. The movie “Angels and Demons” popularized the word.

Ambigrams are not exclusively in English. They exist in other languages and other alphabets, and the concept can be applied to numbers and other symbols besides words.

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● Ancient 
The term may have been coined recently, but mirror ambigrams date back to the first millennium as palindromes designed to be visually symmetrical. In ancient Greece these were referred to as something like mirror writing.

Image credit: Gregory of Nazianzus
Photo Credit: Christine Kekka, Athens, Light corrections by Basie Morin,
Image source: http://commons.wikimedia.org


As early as 79 AD, such designs were produced in the Roman Empire. The earliest discovered Sator Square palindrome was found the in the ruins of Pompeii, which was destroyed by an eruption of the volcano Mount Vesuvius in that year. The Sator square, in brief, is a five-line palindrome, in Latin, using the words: Sator, Arepo, Tenet, Opera, and Rotas.
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Sometime between the Roman Empire and the Middle ages, a Sator square, using mirror writing to represent the letters S and N, was carved into a wall Oppède, France. The lines read Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas, and the letters S and N are reversed as in an ambigram.

     Mikrror ambigram ΝΙΨΟΝ ΑΝΟΜΗΜΑΤΑ ΜΗ ΜΟΝΑΝ ΟΨΙΝ (Wash your sins, not only your face,)
                                                             Written in Greek in the church Hagia Sophia, (Turkey) 380 AD..
                                                             Image Source: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sator_Square


THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF AMBIGRAMS
Today, there are over a dozen different types of ambigrams. The following definitions taken from Wikipedia.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambigram
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● Natural ambigram
A word or number that is an ambigram naturally, without any additional formatting. For example: dollop, suns, pod, swims, and bud.


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● Single word ambigram
Two interpretations are seen when the image is rotated 180 degrees with respect to each other (in other words, a second reading is obtained from the first by simply rotating the sheet).

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● Several words ambigram
A symmetrical ambigram can be called "heterogram" when it gives another word. Visually, a heterogram ambigram is symmetrical only when both versions of the pairing are shown together.

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● 180° rotational ambigrams
"Half-turn" ambigrams or point reflection ambigrams, commonly called "upside-down words", are 180° rotational symmetrical calligraphies. We can read them right side up or upside down, or both. Rotation ambigrams are the most common type of ambigrams for good reason. When a word is turned upside down, the top halves of the letters turn into the bottom halves.

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● Mirror ambigrams (Vertile Axis)
​
A mirror ambigram, or reflection ambigram, is a design that can be read when reflected in a mirror vertically, horizontally, or at 45 degrees, giving either the same word or another word or phrase. When the reflecting surface is vertical (like a mirror for example), the calligraphic design is a vertical axis mirror ambigram.

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● Mirror ambigrams (Horizontal Axis)
When the reflecting surface is horizontal (like a mirroring lake for example), the calligraphic design is a horizontal axis mirror ambigram.

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● Figure-ground ambigrams
In a figure / ground ambigram, letters fit together so the negative space around and between one word spells another word. A design that utilizes the spaces between letters to form additional words.

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● 3-Dimensional
An object that appears to have several different letters or words depending on the viewing angle
.

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​● Chain
Where words and letters are interlinked, sometimes overlapping, to form a repeating chain.

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​● Multi-lingual
A word that can be read one way in a certain language and another way in a completely different language.
​
Mirror ambigram depicting the phrase علي ولي الله (Ali is the vicegerent of God, in Arabic), Ottoman panel, between 1720 and 1730.

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​● Rotational
A word that can be viewed and interpreted while rotating through multiple different angles.

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         ● Spinonyms

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A spinonym is a type of ambigram in which a word is written using the same glyph repeated in different orientations; i.e. all the letters are made out of the same symbol or character. Also referred to as rotoglyphs or rotaglyphs

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● Ambigrams of numbers
Mirror and rotational ambigram of an arithmetic operation illustrating the commutative property in addition.


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​● Space-filling
Somewhat like chain ambigrams, but tiled to fill in a 2-dimensional plane

These are just come of the kinds of ambigrams available. I never found an explanation of what people are supposed to use them for, although some of the uses are self-evident.
 

A FINAL DEFINITION
I noticed some articles which stated that the word Ambigram might not be in the dictionary yet. Doing my due diligence, I looked up the word in Merriam Webster, Dictionary.com, Harper Collins, and the Oxford English Dictionary. It is a dictionary word, although Harper Collins indicates it is still a suggested word for consideration. However, in the process, I also ran onto another definition that isn’t in any of those dictionaries.
Ambigram
"Ambigram is a quinolone/fluoroquinolone antibiotic It is a synthetic fluoroquinolone (fluoroquinolones) with broad-spectrum antibacterial activity against most gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria. Ambigram inhibits bacterial DNA gyrase, which allows the untwisting required to replicate one DNA double helix into two. Notably the drug has 100 times higher affinity for bacterial DNA gyrase than for mammalian.”

JUST SAYIN’ !
□
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambigram
https://ambigramart.com/ambigram-generator/
https://www.pinterest.com/camartica/anagram-ambigram-love/
https://www.adweek.com/creativity/joy-turns-pain-when-you-flip-over-these-clever-suicide-prevention-ads-150621/
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sator_Square_at_Opp%C3%A8de.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ambigram_-_puzzle_-_the_end_-_by_Peter_Newell_1893_-_book_Topsys_and_turvys_(crop).jpg

https://www.yuqo.com/ambigrams-162/#:~:text=An%20ambigram%20is%20an%20artistic%20play%20on%20words,magazines%2C%20albums%2C%20websites%2C%20and%20movies.%20Toggle%20navigation%20Blog

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/words-were-watching-ambigram#:~:text=Different%20Meanings%20of%20Ambigram%20The%20most%20common%20use,an%20%27ambigram%2C%27%20designed%20by%20Frank%20Gregory%20of%20Greenfield.


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September 05th, 2022

9/5/2022

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    Author R. Ann Siracusa

    Novelist, retired architect and urban planner, world traveler, quilter, owl collector, devoted wife-mother-grandmother, great-grandmother, and, according to some, wild-assed liberal.

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