Lo And Behold, The Most Important Four Letter Word Ever

Da special Zeke Upshaw gematria palindrome

Ok, what do we have here.  Date span, blah blah, drop a zero, blah blah, add zeroes blah blah blah, DEATH=218 outside of Death History Month, yawnnnnn!  Geometry is 108 and 108, I’ve seen before and....  Wait a second.  GEOMETRY is super special because it’s 108 in both Ordinal and Reverse Ordinal.  And ZEKE UPSHAW is extra super duper supremely special ‘cause it’s a palindrome in the extended elisions, also.

Now we’re getting into the kind of thing I was hoping for more of when I started this blog.  I get to bust on these pinheads and indulge in math/word games.

Note that “less than 1 in 400 words” is a gematria palindrome in both forward and reverse.  First, ignore the reductions.  That’s really just two elisions matching.  Once the non reduced values match the reductions have to match.  Now I don’t know how this 1 in 400 number was determined.  That makes a total of about 425 words out of a 170,000 main word dictionary a gematria palindrome.  That sounds not unreasonable.  I wonder if somebody ran the entire dictionary through a computer algorithm and demonstrated how they are selectively ignoring the contradictions to their confirmation bias.

But now back to the big reveal.  There’s a big reveal coming up here.  The teaser starts with the post title. Don’t cheat! No scrolling down and spoiling it. As you follow my process you have the chance to guess the word before the big reveal! It’s like a Nancy Drool whodunit and the word is rather unexpected. I’m still giggling when I think of it.

So 425 words or so, probably a bit less.  And a fraction of those are also palindromes in the extended elisions.  This makes me think that the whole dictionary wasn’t run through a computer.  Or maybe it was.  I want a list of all the words in the dictionary that are super duper supremely palindromic gematriots!  But I’ll settle for figuring out one on my own.

For the sake of sanity and limiting the letter combinations to rearrange I want a short word.  It hardly seems fair to expect the evil empire would hide a meaning in a one or two letter word.  Even though the word THE apparently is significant.  So, longer than that.

Gematria palindromes must have an even number of letters.  You can play around with it forever, but  the math simply does not work otherwise.  There’s a total of 27 between the ordinal and reverse values.  So odd# x any# = odd#.  Three letter words are out.  So there you go, four letters.

Words need vowels.  So if I weren’t discriminating on two letter words, LO is a word that actually works. (So does BY).  Each vowel has only one corresponding match.  The full list of complements that equal 27 are:
AZ
EV
IR
OL
UF
YB

Now I’ve got some letters to work with.  But would an evil empire really just limit their consonants to 6 out of 20??  I don’t think so!  It’s nice that LOVE makes it to the list of super duper supreme Gematria palindromes.  I see a ROIL in there and a BEVY.  But notice that you don’t see a lot of the letters for ZEKE UPSHAW there?  Hmmmm.  What to do.

If you’re thinking about it, because of the nature of the extended systems and needing a vowel for a word, you need the letter O if you’re going to use any consonant other than z, v, r, l, f or b.  At least I’m pretty sure that’s the case for a four letter word.  I’m open to being proven wrong.

Let’s pretend JOIT is a word.  Although a palindrome for the non extended versions you start comparing single digits to values in the hundreds.  The letter Tt is 7 in reverse, but 200 in English extended.  Letters earlier in the alphabet suffer the same fate.  O is in a tidy range of values that end in a zero in both original and reverse extended.

So we’re getting closer now.  Here’s another clue not from the derivation of the magic word.  It’s not a very nice word; it’s actually  an insult.  Four letter word containing an O.  Got that?  Good.

So exactly which consonants are in the magic range?

It’s J through Q.  It doesn’t work for  not O vowels and  for example R doesn’t work since it’s 9 vs. 90.  So now our letter list is complete at JKLMNOPQ.  If you want to take a shortcut then throw out the Q without a U to go with it.  One vowel and some letters that are either a Scrabble players dream or nightmare depending on their vocabulary.

So now if something like JMOP is a real word we’re in business.  POLK does work, but proper names don’t really count.  James K. Polk be damned.  You know what I could really use here?

Another vowel.  So that means another O.  Which if you play around with the other consonants available I can only find one super duper supremely special four letter gematria palindrome.

So, this is your last break to pause the video and figure it out before the secret is revealed.  It’s interesting that GEOMETRY is so important that it’s built up as a prelude to ZEKE UPSHAW when GEOMETRY itself is not a palindrome in the extended gematrias.  The word I found is rather coarse. It’s certainly not a word I would expect a selectively incompetent cabal to even bother with.  I’ve never seen it mentioned.  It’s etymology includes a possible derivation from... the Italian word for motherfucker.

Without further ado, here we go:

MOOK

Oh boy.  So much for high class evil super power word creation.  More mundane is a definition meaning a witless incompetent person.  To me it sounds more like what you'd call your favorite nephew as you tousle his hair.  Here’s your birthday present Kyle, ya little mook!  If you want another discussion of the etymology, try this.
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=292773

I like the motherfucker angle better, but either way for a relationship to gematria this is oddly appropriate.  A narrative explaining the value of gematria is because we’re sacred motherfuckers would be hilarious.