In August of 1950, when I was just a little tyke and my sister Laura but a babe in arms, our family set out in our 1947 Kaiser from Princeton, New Jersey, for parts West. We were moving out to California so that my dad could take up a new position in physics at the almost-unknown institution named Leland Stanford Jr. University. En route, we passed through many states and innumerable gas stations. I loved the smell of gasoline when we filled up, and was fascinated by the logos of the many different brands of gas. One day, as we were passing through Ohio, my dad pointed at the sign of the Standard Oil of Ohio station where we had stopped:
The “SOHIO” logo that my dad showed me could be read upside down.
He offhandedly commented that if you twisted your head around, you could read it upside down. He even said it out loud: “Oy-hose.” What a silly-sounding, meaningless word! I practically split my sides. “OIHOS” was the funniest thing my 5-year-old self had ever heard. It was also the first ambigram I had ever seen.
This essay is an adapted excerpt from Hofstadter’s new book.
Well, actually, it wasn’t a true ambigram, but it was a close cousin to one. Let me explain. By ambigram, I mean a piece of writing expressly designed to squeeze in more than one reading. The etymology combines Latin’s ambi, meaning “two-sided,” with Greek’s gram, meaning “piece of writing”—and thus, if you look at an ambigram one way, it says one thing, and if you look at it another way, it says another thing (or possibly the same thing)—and deliberately so. A true ambigram is intentionally designed so as to have that Janus-like property. Since it’s unlikely that the creator of the SOHIO logo had the nonword OIHOS in mind as a rotated reading, I hesitate to call it a true ambigram, although, as my dad keenly observed, it had two pronounceable readings.
When you engage in “ambigrammia” (the act or art of producing an ambigram), you are not so much creating something new as discovering something old—or rather, something timeless, something that already (sort of) existed, something that could have been found by someone else, at least in principle. Ambigrammia is thus neither fish nor fowl, in that it floats somewhere between creation and discovery.
Let me spell this out a bit. Some ambigrams, when you see them, make you think, Oh, that was such an obvious find. A triviality! Anybody would have seen that possibility a mile away. Those are discovery-type ambigrams. Other ambigrams, though, make you wonder, How on earth did anyone ever dream this up? What kind of a mind could have created this? Those are creation-type ambigrams. And then there are ones that lie in between those two extremes.
Over the years, my passion for ambigrammia has given me many insights into creativity and what I call “discoverativity” (a proneness to making discoveries) and how they are linked. Aside from those two “-ivities,” ambigrammia also involves “explorativity” (a passion for probing unfamiliar terrain), “manipulativity” (a bent for tweaking things), and “projectivity” (the ability to imagine how others see things).
Once in a while I write Ambigrammia with a capital A, using it as a proper noun, almost as if it were a place, a realm, a territory, a world—for indeed, Ambigrammia is a microcosm inhabited by, well, Ambigrammists, of course. It’s time that I exhibited some more ambigrams to make all of this more concrete.
Like SOHIO, this design has a second reading if you rotate it by 180 degrees. Do so, and you’ll see that it still says the same thing. It’s not that the word ambigram is a palindrome, of course, nor that it is intrinsically symmetrical. Rather, it was forced to be symmetrical by the act of distorting its letters.
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