secret language
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SECRET
LANGUAGE
BARRY J. BLAKE
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp
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# Barry Blake 2010
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2009941610
Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India
Printed in Great Britain
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ISBN 978–0–19–957928–0
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
ix
xi
1 On being mysterious
1
2 From anagrams to cryptic crosswords
ANAGRAMS
PALINDROMES
SEMORDNILAPS
ACRONYMS AND ACROSTICS
WORD SQUARES
LIPOGRAMS AND UNIVOCALICS
CRYPTIC CROSSWORDS
3 Talking in riddles
RIDDLES
THE REBUS
THE CHARADE
EQUIVOCATION AND PREVARICATION
RIDDLES FOR THE READER
4 Ciphers and codes
7
9
14
18
19
25
30
33
41
41
60
61
64
70
72
78
82
97
100
102
STEGANOGRAPHY
SUBSTITUTION CIPHERS
TRANSPOSITION
CODES
TOWARDS A RANDOM KEY
v
contents
ONE-TIME PAD
SECRET COMMUNICATION IN THE COMPUTER AGE
FINAL WORD
CIPHERS TO SOLVE
5 Biblical secrets
114
114
116
116
118
122
126
KABBALAH
ANAGRAMS
CIPHERS
NOTARIKON
GEMATRIA
ONOMANCY
6 Words of power
BELIEFS ABOUT LANGUAGE
LETTERS AND SYMBOLS
MAGIC WORDS AND FORMULAS
TEXTS OF POWER
ICONICITY
7 Words to avoid
IN-LAWS
OTHER AVOIDANCE
8 Jargon, slang, argot, and ‘secret languages’
JARGON
SLANG
‘SECRET
128
128
139
145
152
161
171
172
185
191
NAMES OF HUMANS
ARGOTS AND
106
108
110
112
LANGUAGES’
9 The everyday oblique
POLITENESS AND THE LIKE
DELIBERATE OBSCURITY
HUMOUR
EUPHEMISM
ABUSIVE LANGUAGE
vi
195
197
200
211
241
244
246
249
250
257
contents
SPEAKING IN OPPOSITES
OXYMORA AND OTHER CONTRADICTIONS
10 Elusive allusions
260
263
265
265
280
283
289
LITERARY ALLUSIONS
ALLUSIVE NAMES
PARODY AND SATIRE
ALLUSIVE BRAINTEASERS
11 Finale
291
Appendix: answers to the problems
298
Select bibliography
Index
304
321
vii
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illustrations
1 Shrinking word
17
2 Acrostic crossword
25
3 Word square
26
4 Eulamo square
26
5 Elohîm square
27
6 Sator square
28
7 Paternoster cross
30
8 Cryptic crossword
39
9 Scytale
75
10 Approximate relative frequencies of letters in English
85
11 Vigenère square
89
12 Della Porta’s cipher and steganography
93
13 Bacon’s biliteral alphabet
95
14 Alberti’s cipher disk
96
15 Jefferson-type cipher device
97
16 Transposition
98
17 ADFGX cipher
99
18 ADFGX transposition
99
19 A codebook
101
ix
illustrations
20 An Enigma machine (schematic diagram over leaf )
104
21 Cipher to solve (a)
112
22 Cipher to solve (b)
113
23 The Hebrew alphabet
115
24 A modern example of notarikon
120
25 The Greek alphabet with numerical values
123
26 The Runic alphabet
144
27 The abracadabra triangle
163
28 Shebrîrî triangle
164
x
acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following for helping me write this book
by supplying references, examples, suggestions, and translations:
Alexandra Aikhenvald, Delia Bentley, Robert Crotty, Michael
Frazer, John Hajek, Andy Pawley, Randy La Polla, Jarinya Thammachoto, Erma Vassiliou, the publisher’s referees, and the ever
helpful John Davey.
Quotations from the Bible are from the Authorized Version
unless otherwise noted.
Translations are my own unless otherwise acknowledged.
xi
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1
ON BEING MYSTERIOUS
Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our
intelligence by means of language.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
L
anguage is a means of communication, but a good deal of
language use is deliberately obscure if not actually encrypted
in some form of cipher or code. This book explores the
reasons for obscurity and secrecy, and touches on some of the
fascinating beliefs that underlie the constraints on using language
freely.
We begin our exploration in Chapter 2 with word games.
Nowadays anagrams, palindromes, and word squares are generally
sources of entertainment, but in the past they were often ascribed
serious significance as elements of sorcery. Word games sometimes
feature acrostics—texts in which a sequence of initials spells out a
word or phrase. The most common case is the acrostic poem,
where the initial letters of the lines form a word or phrase, but
there are authors who cunningly bury all sorts of secret messages in
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passages of prose, as the alert reader may discover in the present
text. All these features of language and others are exploited in the
most popular word game of all, the cryptic crossword.
In all languages some words have more than one meaning,
different words sometimes sound alike, and often a phrase or
sentence can be construed in more than one way. These sources
of ambiguity give scope for making puns and concocting riddles. Chapter 3 reveals that while, for us, riddles may be a
childish novelty, once upon a time heroes were required to
solve riddles as well as performing physical feats, and prophets
found it useful to phrase their predictions in the ambiguous
language of riddles.
There are times when communicating in secret is crucial. In
time of war, for instance, information needs to be passed secretly
between governments and military authorities. Acrostics can serve
an important purpose in relation to secrecy, as we see in Chapter 4.
We also consider how letters can be shuffled or replaced by other
letters to form a cipher and how words can be replaced by other
words in a code.
The ciphers and codes used by governments and the military are
recognized as such, but some scholars claim there are anagrams,
ciphers, and acrostics hidden in the Bible. They also perceive a
hidden significance in the numerical properties of biblical diction.
In a number of ancient languages, including Hebrew, the letters of
the alphabet served as numbers, just as our Roman numerals do
(clix can be 159 or a brand name for dry biscuits or crackers). This
means one can add up the numerical values of the letters in words,
which in turn creates scope for comparing totals and finding
significance in the fact that certain words produce the same total.
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on being mysterious
The Bible is an example of literature dealing with belief in the
supernatural—a belief which links mainstream religion with what
is classified as superstition.1 All societies believe in the supernatural, although of course not all individuals do. Large-scale societies
include sceptics, agnostics, and atheists, and nowhere is this truer
than in present-day western society. But we are exceptional. We
may become the norm in the future, but we are anomalous by
comparison with the small-scale societies that existed in the past.
Scepticism is a product of civilization, which encourages recognition of more than one system of belief. Long-term observation and
experiment take some of the mystery out of awe-inspiring events
such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tidal waves, and eclipses of
the sun and moon—occurrences which past societies often attributed to supernatural powers. Belief in the supernatural accounts
for some of the strongest constraints on straightforward communication, and chapters 6 and 7 are largely concerned with this. In
many cultures certain words and phrases cannot be used for fear of
offending a god or spirit and inviting retribution, while conversely
some words and phrases are thought to have the power to enlist
supernatural intervention in the physical world. Knowledge of
these efficacious words and phrases—or magic words—is often
restricted to initiates. Although few people in contemporary western society believe in magic, the notion of the magic word plays an
important part in our culture. The spell word abracadabra is well
known, as is the charm phrase Open sesame, which reflects the
1
The Christians’ miracle is the pagans’ magic. Even within Christendom we find orthodox Christians describing as magic what heretics
claimed as miracles, while Lollards and later Reformers referred to some
traditional Catholic practices as magical (Kieckhefer 1994: 815).
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Arabian strand in our literary heritage. Popular literature, particularly works aimed at the young, are full of magic and magic words.
Think of The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings, and more
recently the Harry Potter novels, where the magic words are
mostly modelled on Latin. They include incendio (produces
fire), serpentortia (conjures up a serpent), and silencio (silences
someone).
In many cultures certain texts are considered sacred and are
believed to contain records of divine revelation. The best-known
examples are the Bible and the Qur’an, but there are numerous
others, including some that are orally transmitted from generation
to generation. Sacred texts have often been invested with the
power of healing—and by this I mean not just their contents but
the physical texts themselves. We read of cases where, in the hope
of effecting a cure, the Bible has been placed against stricken parts
of a patient’s body, or where verses from the Bible have been given
to a patient to eat. More often such verses have been worn in
amulets or charms to avert misfortune.2 In the early centuries of
2
There is another term that vies with amulet, namely talisman. I will
treat amulet and talisman as synonymous. Some writers distinguish them,
but different writers use different criteria. Some take a talisman to be an
amulet that attracts good fortune as opposed to warding off bad fortune,
some take a talisman to contain text, while others consider a talisman to
contain astrological images such as the signs of the zodiac or images of
planets, and others again take a talisman to be an amulet that is used for a
specific task such as guarding buried treasure (Budge 1978: 13–14; Skemer
2006: 6–9). The term charm overlaps with amulet and talisman. Originally
it referred to an incantation, then it covered a text used in an amulet, and
finally it came to denote the amulet itself, as in the modern charm
bracelet.
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on being mysterious
Christianity the Bible was also thought to be a source of divination
and prophecy and a guide to appropriate courses of action:
devotees had only to open the Bible at random and take heed of
the first verse that came to eye. St Augustine attributes his conversion to committed Christianity to this simple method.
People who work together, live in the same area, or congregate
through common interests are likely to develop distinctive forms
of language that are a barrier to communication with the wider
language community. This differentiation is dealt with in Chapter 8.
Sometimes it arises from the specialized terminology or jargon of
an occupation or leisure pursuit, but often it comes from a
conscious desire for demarcation from the larger community.
Language is an important marker of identity and people often
foster a distinctive vocabulary, particularly of a colloquial variety.
Among criminals and others who tend to attract the attention of
the authorities, an elaborate argot often develops, a mixture of
slang and jargon. Such in-group languages serve both to bond their
users and to create codes which are opaque to the authorities. They
employ two means of disguise. One is a type of code in which
mainstream words are replaced with substitutes: stir for ‘jail’ and
screw for ‘jailer’, in two well-known examples. The other is closer
to cipher, for instance, back slang, where words are pronounced
backwards (so that fish comes out as shif ), or Pig Latin, where
initial consonants become the initial of a final syllable with the
rhyme -ay so that ‘Pig Latin’, for instance, becomes Igpay Atinlay.
Obscurities of various kinds are common in everyday life. Many
people go out of their way to be ironical or playfully abusive. Some
interlard their speech with double meanings or use expressions
such as, ‘Were you born in a barn?’ rather than ‘Would you mind
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shutting the door after you’. Others favour euphemisms. These
deviations from straight talking are covered in Chapter 9.
When people play overt language games such as cryptic crosswords and riddles the fact that there is a hidden meaning is quite
clear. Often the teasing is covert, however, as when people insert
passages from a previous text into their speech or writing, or choose
an allusive name. Such allusions are the subject of Chapter 10.
A good example of a literary allusion is the novel White Mischief
by James Fox, better known from the 1987 film. It presents a
scathing portrait of decadence among the British elite in Kenya
during World War II. The title plays on Black Mischief, a comic
novel by Evelyn Waugh published in 1932, which tends to see
black Africans as a source of humour in a way that would be
considered politically incorrect or somewhat racist nowadays. If
one accepts this interpretation of Black Mischief, it gives an edge to
the view of the British elite presented in White Mischief.
Allusions are also cleverly embedded within some fictional
names. Have you ever wondered why the computer controlling
the space mission in 2001: A Space Odyssey is called HAL? Why do
you think the bad guy in The Da Vinci Code is called Sir Leigh
Teabing? These names are not arbitrary. They are enciphered
allusions. Read on and all will be revealed.
6
2
FROM ANAGRAMS TO
CRYPTIC CROSSWORDS
He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he
who does not ask a question remains a fool forever.
CHINESE PROVERB
T
his chapter deals with the written form of language. It
may come as a surprise to some people that writing is a
comparatively recent invention. Humans have been
speaking for well over a hundred thousand years, probably some
hundreds of thousands of years. They have also been using hand
signs, and it may be that signing predates speech. Writing was
invented in Mesopotamia and Egypt far more recently, in the
fourth millennium bc. It is thought that most writing systems
can be traced back to these beginnings in the Near East, but
writing was also developed independently somewhat later in
China and Central America.1
1
For a brief illustrated account see Blake 2008, ch. 10.
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Not all humans have access to writing. Even today the vast
majority of the world’s languages are not written, though this is
obscured by the fact that national languages such as Chinese,
English, Hindi-Urdu, and Russian are written.2 Writing is derivative, a way of representing speech, yet many people treat it as the
primary form of language. There is also a lot that is arbitrary about
writing. For instance, English is written in the Roman alphabet,
but in theory it could be written in the Greek or Cyrillic alphabet.
Spelling is also arbitrary. Words like music and logic were once spelt
musick and logick, and words like honour and labour have the
alternative spellings honor and labor.
Although writing is essentially a means of representing speech in
permanent form and although the means of representation is
arbitrary, people in literate societies become fascinated by the
written symbols, whether these represent individual phonemes as
in Europe, syllables as in Japanese and Korean, or words as in
Chinese. People notice that there can be systematic relationships
between the written form of two or more different words and
between parts of different words. One such relationship is the
anagram, where the letters of one word can be rearranged to
form one or more other words. The words prose, ropes, pores, and
poser are anagrams of one another.3 Another relationship that holds
for some words is that they are spelt the same way backwards as
2
Hindi-Urdu is essentially one language. It is called Hindi in India and
written in Devanagari script, and it is called Urdu in Pakistan and written
in a form of Persian (ultimately Arabic) script.
3
Some anagrams can be found in speech as in lifer and filer, where the
anagrammatic relationship is simple, but in written language it is possible
using pen and paper to find more complicated anagrammatic relationships.
8
from anagrams to cryptic crosswords
forwards. These are palindromes and examples include words such
as level, madam, minim, and tenet. Note that the palindromic
relationship does not hold for the spoken form since there is an
unstressed vowel in the second syllable, though spoken palindromes are possible, especially in monosyllabic words such as tat,
tit, and tot. In some cases spelling a word backwards produces a
different word; for instance, star spelt backwards yields rats. Such
pairs are sometimes referred to as mirror words or semordnilaps, a
term which is itself formed by reversing the word palindromes.
Parts of words in a phrase, sentence, or text can spell out a word
or phrase. The most common example is the acrostic poem, where
initial letters of lines spell out a name.
Written words can be arranged in patterns such as squares and
the incorporation of anagrams, palindromes, mirror words, and
acrostics into such word squares has been popular for centuries.
Today picking out word patterns is considered a form of light
entertainment. There is a game called Anagrams, for instance, in
which players have to compose anagrams using lettered tiles like
those in Scrabble. Anagrams and palindromes are to be found
mostly in cryptic crosswords, but it is interesting to note that
palindromes and other forms of word play have been a regular
feature of curses and charms for centuries, and in the past people
have often seen hidden meanings in the formal properties of
written words.
Anagrams
As mentioned above, an anagram is a word made up of the letters
of another word, so that reside is an anagram of desire and vice
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versa. Other groups of words sharing an anagrammatic relationship are Alice/Celia, amend/named, artisan/tsarina, conical/laconic,
prenatal/paternal/parental, rescued/reduces, and listen/silent/tinsel.
There can be an anagrammatic relationship between a word and
a phrase, as with ovation/too vain and hitherto/other hit ; or between
phrases, as with same old story, which yields phrases such as delays
motors and dreamy stools. Anagrams are not all that difficult to find,
at least in English, and nowadays anagram-producing computer
programs are freely available on the Web. Although the availability
of such programs threatens to take some of the fun out of finding
anagrams, there is still satisfaction to be had in finding an anagram
that is related in meaning to the original word or phrase. When the
US government repealed the eighteenth amendment and allowed
its citizens to buy alcohol again, Wyndham Lewis wrote Tons ’o
drink, even ale, for all, an anagram of the name of the then
president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Bergerson 1973: vii). The
word astronomers anagrams to moon starers and the name of the
former Conservative British prime minister Margaret Thatcher
produces Meg, the arch tartar and an ironic that great charmer.
The Greek poet Lycophron of Chalcis is often credited with
being the inventor of the anagram, but it is likely that anagrams
were in use long before Lycophron since fairly obvious examples
are found in Greek, such as åº (cholos) ‘choler’ and Zåº
(ochlos) ‘mob’ (as in ochlocracy ‘mob rule’). Anagrams were popular in Ancient Greek culture and Lycophron, who lived during the
reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus (285–247 bc), included an anagram
of the king’s name in his poem Cassandra: —ˇ¸¯`ˇ
‘Ptolemaios’ became `—ˇ ¯¸ˇ (apo melitos) ‘made of
honey’. There is at least one example of something akin to an
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from anagrams to cryptic crosswords
anagram that purports to predate Lycophron. It involves a simple
word break, but it is an illustration of how seriously patterns of
letters could be taken. When Alexander the Great was besieging
Tyre, he dreamt of a satyr. One of his advisers interpreted this as a
good omen because satyros (Æıæ) could be broken up into
Sa Tyros (Æ æ) ‘Tyre is yours’, a prophecy that was fulfilled
(Plutarch, Alexander XXIV: 8–9).
In the classical world anagrams of names were considered
significant, a belief that continued into the Middle Ages. Some
people believed that a person’s character or fate could be discovered by anagramming the letters of his or her name, and that a
curse could be lifted by rearranging the letters of the afflicted
person’s name (Augarde 1984: 71).
It has been common in Europe for centuries for authors to
incorporate anagrams of their names into poems, and it was
popular to form anagrams from biblical texts. The first example
below is much quoted. It is from the Latin version of the Bible (the
Vulgate). It is a good anagram in that its sense fits in with the sense
of the original, but remember that with a large number of letters
there are many possibilities and in the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries numerous anagrams with meanings related to
the original were made from this verse (Sarton 1936).
Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. (Luke 1:28)
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Virgo serena, pia, munda et immaculata.
Virgin serene, holy, pure and immaculate.
The following is another much-quoted example. The anagram
forms a possible reply to the question posed by Pontius Pilate.
11