avid (avid) adjective

   1. Having an ardent desire or unbounded craving; greedy.

   2. Marked by keen interest and enthusiasm.

[Latin avidus, from avere, to desire.]

   "Global Exchange, for instance, is an outfit of 40 people based in San
   Francisco, and an avid believer in street protest."
   Angry and effective, Economist, Sep 23, 2000.

A popular motivational saying goes, "Desserts is stressed spelled backwards."
This is an example of a reversible word, which when read from the right
yields another word. All of this week's words exhibit this quality. Just like
reversible clothing that changes pattern when worn inside out, reversible
words result in other usable words. A special case of reversible words are
palindromes, which spell the same when reversed. So palindromes are a subset
of reversible words which in turn are a subset of anagrams. Another name for
reversible words is semordnilap, a self-referential word coined by reversing
the word palindromes.

Some words coined in this manner have actually entered the dictionary. Here
are two examples: YOB (a rowdy youth), coined by reversing BOY, and MHO
(former unit of conductance), coined by reversing OHM, the unit of electrical
resistance.

Taking inspiration from the above desserts/stressed saying, can you coin a
pithy aphorism using some word and its semordnilap? Don your wordsmith hats
and send your gems to anu@wordsmith.org. Original entries only, please. I'll
publish selected ones here in a compilation next week. Here is a helpful
hint: you can elicit semordnilapic quality in many words by forming their
plural, past tense, etc. Also, semordnilaps are especially useful in creating
longer palindromic words. Here is a simple example, "Devil Dennis sinned,
lived." Can you come up with something more interesting? Email them to the
above address.                                                      -Anu

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All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward. -Ellen Glasgow,
novelist (1874-1945)

Q: Some time ago you featured a quote/word about x in AWAD. Could you resend 
it?
A: You may search the archives at http://wordsmith.org/awad/search.html
   or browse them at http://wordsmith.org/awad/archives.html All the
   words and quotes since the beginning of AWAD are available there.

Pronunciation:
http://wordsmith.org/words/avid.wav
http://wordsmith.org/words/avid.ram