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When you're driving and there's a taxi or
ambulance behind you, the lettering 'TAXI'
or 'AMBULANCE' of course shows up as
flipped horizontally in your rear-view
mirror*. This is OK, and perfectly
readable, but aesthetically displeasing.
Of the two, the word 'TAXI' is better of
course because
each of the letters is the
same when flipped horizontally, but it
then reads 'IXAT'. It would be far better
to rename taxis and ambulances to not only
use letters which are the same when
flipped horizontally (A, H, I, M, O, T, U,
V, W, X, Y) but also be palindromic words.
[* we will ignore for now the
reasons why mirrors only flip things
horizontally and not vertically...]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambigram
[pocmloc, Sep 28 2021]
ambulance written both ways
https://en.wikipedi...wiki/Mirror_writing
[xandram, Sep 29 2021]
Lingojam
https://lingojam.com/MirrorYourText
Mirror your text generator [reensure, Oct 04 2021]
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Annotation:
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If you lie on your side, then the mirror flips things vertically. |
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You could use vertical-symmetric letters if you run the lettering sideways up and down the edges of the vehicle. |
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There's also the possibility of creative typography. For example, B can flip to E, C to D, G to Q, J to L, P to Q, S to Z, b to d, e to g, and of course lower-case l is symmetrical. Beyond that, typographic artwork can be astonishing, I have seen Chinese and Arabic calligraphy that also reads in English, as well as bilingual logos or signs in Latin letters which can be read in either language. |
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[a1] Indeed! That's the kind of thing I meant |
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WOAOW would read mirrored and palindromically and - and!
- be a reasonable phonetic approximation of an ambulance
siren. Or WAOAW, I suppose, though that would perhaps put
more pressure on the already chronically underfunded
Department of Kerning. |
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[calum] Yes, and there's a chronic shortage of skilled
kerners at the moment - probably because of Brexit
[pocmloc] Nice use of lower case, but I regard the (t=j)
doctrine as heresy |
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As usual, hippo, you have the germ of a good idea but your inherent Britishness does not allow you to go nearly far enough with it & push things to their logical conclusion.
The underlying reasoning, that something should be changed for purely aesthetic purposes is entirely sound. However, you have settled on a very minor change instead of the radical overhaul that needs to be enacted. Which is, of course, that we need to eliminate all the characters from the alphabet that are not palindromic & replace them with new letters that are.
That way people will not have to struggle with getting used to new names for things, they will just have to spell them differently.
B+ for effort! |
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A simple 999 would do the job. When behind you
and laterally inverted in the mirror, it reads as
666, the deadly mark of beast so it's best to get
out of its way. |
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[xenzag] I like your thinking, but wouldn't a reversed 999
read more like PPP which as far as I know doesn't have any
as-yet well defined biblical ownership connotations. I'm sure
we could make something up though. |
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These are Australian mirrors |
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Around here AMBULANCE is usually written already
flipped on the front of the vehicle so it can be
read properly from the rear view mirror. |
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Around here, the fire trucks have "FIRE" in both regular AND
mirror image on the front. Never seen the same on an
ambulance; probably because the word is so long. |
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[a1] Ambulance is written both ways so you can
see it anyway you look at it. See link |
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^ well I live in the usa and I have seen them here. |
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I tried to use a nice, symmetrical Greek character. But the 'bakery comment box just replaced it with the ASCII code. Which also wasn't symmetrical. :( |
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I wonder if "boss level" texts with only the first and last letters
in their correct order in words have a corresponding level of
difficulty when read in a mirror. 911 doesn't covert well in
HB text boxes. |
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Or just have 90 deg. mirror angles on the sides of cards. |
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I like this, just do palindromes with the letters:
AHIMOTUVWXY. Clever. |
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itAXAti sort of implies "taxi". |
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It somehow looks as if it meant something rude in Basque. |
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Like you'd hold up some bizarre configuration of fingers while
you yell it. |
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A slightly niche application of this idea is to use the
letters "IOHSXZMW" which have rotational symmetry but
not necessarily mirror symmetry. Thus if a vehicle is
involved in a catastrophic accident and ends up a
crumpled wreck upside down in the middle of the road,
then the lettering on the front of the vehicle displaying a
word such as "WHIXXIHM" will still be readable. |
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And you criticised me for t and j... |
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There's no justice, is there? :-) |
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