CRYPTOQUOTE

When I was a ninth-grader, I devoured books--often completing a book a day, if not more. Of course, as was my practice, I didn't always read the books that were assigned to me--thus my grades. But I went through a drama period--reading all the plays of Williams, Miller, O'Neill, etc. And a poetry binge, reading the collected works of Cummings, for example. And of course I read all of Edgar Allan Poe, whose classic tales of madness and horror fueled many an exciting evening.

I especially enjoyed his classic "The Gold Bug" because I was fascinated by the "substitution cipher" that was a key element to the plot. In "The Gold Bug", the cryptogram, as it was called, involved each letter of the secret message being replaced by a different letter or even a symbol, thus testing the wits of anyone eager to uncover the important information contained therein. Poe's stories of ratiocination, those three short works that feature literature's first detective--C. Auguste Dupin-- are often considered in a separate category from most of his other works, but I thought that "The Gold Bug" offered the same kinds of pleasure one derives from trying to determine the identity of the murderer or thief that one finds in the Dupin stories. Plus there is a code to crack! When I was eleven, I started my first job--delivering the daily Long Island tabloid Newsday to about forty families in my neighborhood. I read the paper daily. Even after I stopped delivering Newsday, I still subscribed to it through my high school. I'd receive a copy at school each morning. The paper, in addition to a crossword puzzle and comic strips, had a Cryptoquote puzzle (see above for a recent example) six days a week. It, too, was a simple substitution cipher. Using my knowledge from "The Gold Bug" about the frequency letters are employed in the English language, and the combinations one is likely to encounter, I started trying to decode the puzzle each day.

I researched letter frequency. I looked for one and two letter words. In English, only "I" and "A" appear as solo words. Two-letter words were usually "It, In, Is, If, To, Of, On, An, At". Repeated three-letter words often turned out to be "the" or "and". Words with apostrophes were often easy opportunities to find purchase in the puzzle. Plus, if I got just a few key letters, I could often figure out who the author was, and that would provide me a whole raft of letters. In the puzzle above, for instance, it didn't take me long to see that "xw", which appears four times, was likely the word "is". If the "x" was a substitute for "i", and two other words ended in "xda", it grew more likely that those three letters were "ing". The letter "p" seemed likely, then, to be a code for the letter "o", which was the second to last letter in each of the names. So the author of the quote would be ___n__on ? _o_n_on. The name now seemed likely to be Lyndon B. Johnson. I filled in those letters and came up with the following quote: "You know, doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right." Good quote, right?

In tenth grade, I think, I vowed to solve one hundred cryptoquotes in a row. I often set up these arbitrary pursuits. I restricted myself by saying that the puzzle needed to be completed before I received the next day's issue. If I had not figured out the puzzle, I was compelled to start again at the beginning. I plugged away successfully week after week, often sussing out the answer in some class or other where I was ignoring the lesson of the day. When I hit ninety in a row, I felt quite confident that the end was just a week or two away and that I could retire as the champion. But a couple of days later, I found myself in a dilemma. I just couldn't make the answers work. I didn't complete the puzzle that day, so I labored feverishly in my classes the next morning. My Bible as Literature class was third period, and that's when I would receive the next day's issue of Newsday. Finally, I put down what seemed to be a reasonable quote. But by doing so, it meant that the author's name had consecutive letters "a", something I couldn't imagine. It turned out that my quote was correct, and that it was penned by one Soren Kierkegaard (see below), a completely new name to me.

Coincidentally enough, I wound up teaching Kierkegaard, the father of Existentialism, for a few years in the Philosophy class I created before I retired. Enjoyed him completely, especially after the angst he caused me!

Naturally, I completed the hundred in a row and largely retired from this challenge. But years later, when I was a public high school teacher and yearbook advisor, I had cause to return to my cryptology skill set. Senior students are asked to submit a quote to be placed next to their yearbook photo. We allowed seniors 100 spaces to convey their parting thoughts. Most quotes were fairly innocuous and upbeat in nature, with love to mom and a bestie or two. Often a song lyric made its appearance. But one student of questionable maturity submitted what appeared to be gibberish. As someone who proofread assiduously, I recognized the likelihood that this senior's quote was submitted in a substitution cipher. I was worried that once the yearbook was distributed, the student would be able to reveal the code to anyone, and that my staff and I might potentially be in hot water. So, I did what came naturally. I cracked the code. In her hundred letters, this student bashed her alcoholic math teacher, even employing a twelve-letter word involving a prominent family member and an Anglo-Saxon expletive to make her point. What was I to do? If I revealed my finding to the student, what was to stop her from creating a code I couldn't crack? So, I resorted to an unethical act I'm somewhat ashamed to say. I took the most popular senior quote of that year--the line "What a long, strange trip it's been" by the Grateful Dead, and rewrote it using the wayward student's cipher! I figured, she couldn't expose what she had originally written without getting herself in trouble. The staff and I could say we were sorry to garble the letters, but it was hard to get her quote correct since it seemed like nonsense words to begin with. It's funny, not a single person has ever thought that I acted unprofessionally in that circumstance!

Recently, I looked up cryptoquotes again, and much to my surprise I knocked off ten or twelve in a row with little sweat. I guess they are easier to solve than I thought, or I've still got it!