“Ollah, ki neb nahoj repsaj. ki noow ni nessa. ne ki iaard sejdroow mo.” It rolls out of his mouth like that. Johan Jasper from Assen can turn words very well, he says that above. He even won a prize with it: the NK useless talents of radio station Joe.
“I joke that it is a title, it is a Dutch championship,” Jasper says with a smile on his face. “I am not proud of it, because it is not about anything at all. But it is fun.”
From the age of ten Johan Jasper has been busy turning words. He saw another child doing it in a youth program. “I liked that so much. Everyone sometimes turned their own name, but with me it continued with longer words.”
Turning words comes back in his life every day. Wherever Jasper is, when he hears words he does not know yet, he turns it around. “Or when I hear a name, I turn it around again. Sometimes another word comes back.”
Even within his family there are three words that regularly turn back: SeoMleppa, Edalocohc and Moorgals. In other words: apple sauce, chocolate and whipped cream. “Things we like,” he laughs.
One of the most beautiful words is according to Jasper measuring system. “Because if you turn it around, it is also a measurement system and the Y splits exactly the word.”
But his talent goes further than just being able to turn words. Jasper knows fairly quickly how many letters are in a word, although he is sometimes a letter next to it. And he also knows how much syllables a word has or in what place which letter of the alphabet comes.
“When I count the number of letters in a sentence and that sentence contains 26 letters, then that is a cheer moment for me,” he concludes. “Because the alphabet also has 26 letters.”