Gotta show you the comic first—I didn’t notice the joke in this Argyle Sweater until I read the caption at the bottom.
Now you know why I wrote “letterplay” instead of “wordplay.” A palindrome is a situation where something has the same order of letters both backwards and forward. Punctuation and spaces don’t count.
And here’s the academics: “palin” (πάλιν) is Greek for “back” (in the sense of “again”) and “drome” (well, dromos (δρόμος), is Greek for “race,” which implies running.
So there you have it—a lesson in Classical Greek based on a comic.