This is an alphabetic pun. People who do speak English but do not write it much never laugh when they hear it. It plays with the interchangeability of letters that, with an alphabetically trained ear, you can ‘hear’ – or is it ‘see’? It is English spelling that makes us perceive one word as the reverse of another, that is, as the same sequence of segments turned backwards. Segments, more specifically phonemic segments, are, it is widely believed, what alphabetic letters encode. However, alphabetic writing has been cited as evidence both for the psychological reality of segments (Cohn 2001: 198) and for the view that segments are a mere projection (Morais et al. 1979). The argument cuts either way. How would it be possible to encode speech as a sequence of discrete graphical elements (letters) unless there were corresponding units in the mental representation of language?