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What Do These Eight Words Have in Common?

The Puzzler

RAY: The answer is that if you take the first letter of each of these words and put it at the end, and then spell the word backwards, you wind up with the original word.

TOM: Excellent.

RAY: For example, voodoo is V-O-O-D-O-O, you put the V at the end and it's V-O-O, D-O-O backwards. OK? Now before we get 9,000 emails saying there are many more words you can add to this list, I know there are.

TOM: Right. You didn't say these were all the, the only words.

RAY: Oh no. By no means. So anyway, do we have a winner?

TOM: Yes, we do have a winner. The winner this week is Mary Pat Ross from Chicago, Illinois. And for having her answer selected at random from among all those correct answers that we got, Mary Pat gets a 26-dollar gift certificate to the Shameless Commerce Division at, with which she can get a red, white and black Car Talk Plaza baseball shirt. Oh boy. After all, pitchers and catchers are on their way to training camps as we speak, and you know what that means.

RAY: Yeah, only 10 more weeks of winter for us.

[ Car Talk Puzzler ]

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