You must not do crossword puzzles. Ere is one of the small common words that appear all the time.
Yes, I do, and yes it is (and the better crosswords avoid these kinds of words.) It doesn’t change my statement at all, unless you somehow believe most people do crossword puzzles.
The process of constructing palindromes is sometimes discussed in Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics. For example, “Palindromic Construction” from the May 1991 issue has this advice:
I remember recently reading a longer article there all about the best ways of writing them, but I can’t find it now. If you search the online archive you might be able to find it yourself.
“Do nine men interpret nine men?” I nod.
Here’s a somewhat longer, and apparently rather well-known palindrome that makes a bit of sense:
Doc, note, I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod.
I know a guy who once claimed to have invented that. But it’s all over the Net now, and I doubt he really did. Wonder how that got invented, though, whoever did it.
Here’s a famous Latin palindrome (I first heard it circa 1972, long before the Internet was widely known), that allegedly makes sense. But I showed it to a community college teacher, who in turn showed it to the Latin teacher, who declared it utterly incomprehensible:
In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
This is supposedly Satan’s response to the question asked of him by Sir Thomas Aquinas: “Just what do you do in Hell anyway?”, and allegedly means “We gather in the night and are consumed in fire.”
A kids’ book I read back in the third grade or so contained the prophecy “Night turn to noon, and rivers burn with frozen fire, ere Dyrnwyn be regained”. If it’s fair to expect a third-grader to understand “ere”, then it’s fair to expect it of an adult, too.
shrug I think you may be surprised. Seriously, thoguh, I don’t even know how that’s said. “Eer”? “Air”? Something different? I say “air” in my head when I read it. I’ve literally never heard anyone say it aloud. I’d be absolutely stunned if the majority of American English speakers know what it means.
I do. Mostly in books, but I’ve heard of “ere” and known its meaning since I was a kid.
The first time I heard that one was in Riders In The Sky “The Ballad Of Palindrome”
Unlikely. You want to start with a palindromic squence and those two words don’t make one. More likely it started with “oscillate metallic” and worked from there.
As far as the “Able was I…” drome, it dates from the middle of the 19th century. This page says 1860s. Note that that page lists two palindromes from the letter column of an 1866 children’s magazine that use “ere” as their middle. One of them is certainly based on the Able-drome and the other probably borrowed that element.
Also note that the “Doc, note”-drome is credited to Peter Hilton, British code-breaker on the team that solved the Enigma code. Unlikely that he was Senegoid’s aquaintance.
I know this hinged heavily on dialect, but are there any well-known phonemic English palindromes? That is: sentences that, if spoken in the correct accent and transcribed in IPA, would be palindromic.
Interesting idea! Even if you found something that “worked,” it would probably sound rather weird when literally replayed backwards, because the “onset” of most phonemes tends to have a different quality than the “middle” or the “end” (especially in, for example, English).
We can already eliminate “there’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold” as a candidate. 
Some years ago sitting around killing time I tried to write some. (Even posted a thread).
Here’s what I came up with:
**Hey, Yo has tits ahoy! yeh?
stare, but I tube rats**
and my masterpiece:
Name a demand. Esa reign! I don’t ask. Come here he mocks at noding. I erase DNA. Me Daeman.
Admittedly I’m not very good at it. But I did it just as people described above - starting with a word and just adding at both ends. As to the question of how people create good palindromes? Well, there I remain mystified.
Here are a couple I remember from an Archie comic I read as a kid (actually where learned what a palindrome was. I was so enthused by the idea I memorized them):
**Was it Tim’s mitt I saw?
Ditty won straw warts, now I did**
Not previously mentioned:
(The first conversation could have contained two palindromes)
Madam, I’m Adam.
Eve.
(seen in a children’s puzzle book)
Was it a cat I saw?
(Someone’s user name)
Dr. Awkward
(I found this one)
never even
(Longest know single-word -dromes)
deified
reifier
(Mirror image words)
stressed desserts
Wow
Tulsa nightlife: filth, gin, a slut.
My favourite:
Dennis, Nell, Edna, Leon, Nedra, Anita, Rolf, Nora, Alice, Carol, Leo, Jane, Reed, Dena, Dale, Basil, Rae, Penny, Lana, Dave, Denny, Lena, Ida, Bernadette, Ben, Ray, Lila, Nina, Jo, Ira, Mara, Sara, Mario, Jan, Ina, Lily, Arne, Bette, Dan, Reba, Diane, Lynn, Ed, Eva, Dana, Lynne, Pearl, Isabel, Ada, Ned, Dee, Rena, Joel, Lora, Cecil, Aaron, Flora, Tina, Arden, Noel and Ellen sinned.
This page has a lot of palindromes including
*“Naomi, sex at noon taxes,” I moan.
Evil I did dwell; lewd did I live.
Was it a car or a cat I saw?*
Check out the brilliant line palindrome Doppelgänger near the end of that page.
… And I’ll link, not for the first time, to a Youtube of a reading of the line palindrome “Lost Generation”.
For a real-life almost-but-not-quite palindromic name, we have Robert Abplanalp, industrialist, inventor of the aerosol spray valve, conservative Republican, and personal good buddy of Richard Nixon.
I tend to feel the same way: if a palindrome is ingenious but wildly far-fetched and / or basically not making sense, I pretty much can’t be doing with it. Though re palindromes, different people will “drop this bar” at different levels…
septimus’s linked-to item indeed contains many good ones – including a great favourite of mine, still the longest I know which IMO kind-of makes sense: “T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. I’d assign it a name: gnat dirt upset on drab pot toilet.”
In a conversation once with a work colleague, I proudly quoted the “T. Eliot” one. He considered it to be too much of a stretch, and essentially nonsensical; spoke of his preference for palindromes which were maybe shorter, but said something which made sense – citing as an example of that, the above “Was it a car or a cat I saw?”. Feeling slightly nettled, I rejoined that a person would have to be mostly-blind, or moronic, to be unable to tell the difference between a car or a cat; to which he gave a somewhat testy reply. We realised that we were being rather childish, and changed the subject…