Cipher and Secret Letter Code

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Martha Barnette.

Subductus Salivandus Alens Travolta Switch Taintless, Ambrilla Escutimo Dormitory.

Wait, what? Who are you and what are you saying?

It’s my secret code. I just said, welcome to A Way with Words. I am Grant.

You did?

All right, so here’s what happened. I was reading this spy novel by Len Dayton. Great stuff, set in Berlin. And in this book, you know how authors will just like throw in this little thing and not explain it. He mentioned commercial codes. And I’m like, well, now I have to Google that. Commercial codes. Commercial codes. And I looked it up and it turns out that these are codes, like actual ciphers used to hide information from the enemy or your competitors or somebody else or from the government. And there’s books of these, like many, many books of these and lists of these where you take what you want to say, you look it up in the code book, you write it all out and figure out what word stands for what other word, and then you send that by telegram. Obviously, this is like from the 1950s and earlier, even late 1800s, really. So in the telegraph era, when telegrams were a thing, you had to hide your messages because the person keying them or receiving the message could read what you wrote, right? And so these books were used for that. Like you might report on ship movements or you might report back to the home office on what your competitor is doing. Or, I mean, government and business in general use these.

And so there’s this book. It’s called McNeil’s Code. You can find it at archive.org. So you look up thousands of words and then there’s another word that it stands for.

Oh, interesting.

So it’s like the Navajo Code Talkers only manufactured.

Yeah.

So what they’ve done for this particular code, and there are a lot of different versions, they’ve pillaged many other languages. And so they’ve got words from Spanish and Italian and German standing in for the English words.

Oh, wow.

For example, salmografo is an Italian word that means psalm writer, P-S-A-L-M, right? But in this code, it means today.

Oh.

There’s no synchronicity whatsoever.

Okay, got it.

It’s anonymously standing in for this other word. You can’t look at the meanings at all.

Okay, so that means today.

Today.

Today.

Another word, spanditoio, is an Italian word that means drying lines that you might hang your laundry on to dry the cold. Close, but it means very good.

Oh, wow.

So you just look this stuff up and kind of laboriously figure it out. And so my opening lines were not exactly what I usually say, which is I’m Grant Barrett, because there was no word for Barrett in there, so I only used my first name.

Okay.

Let me just close with something else here.

Okay.

If I wanted to say call now, 877-929-9673, I would say,

I love it.

That’s gorgeous. That’s the kind of thing I would have loved to have in elementary school, you know, to talk to my friends and nobody else would know.

Wait until the fifth grade hears about commercial codes.

This is terrific.

So what’s the book that you can find?

This one is called McNeil’s Code. But if you just Google the words commercial codes, you will come up with a ton of books, many of them from the 1800s, early 1900s. Fully out there.

Very interesting.

A lot of them are related to specific domains like mining or shipping, diplomacy, that sort of thing.

Who knew?

Yeah, now we do. Thanks, Lynn Dayton, the great spy novel writer. I really appreciate that tip off.

Well, this is the show where we talk about codes and language and meaning and all kinds of other things. So call us, 877-929-9673.

Or you can send us an email. That address is words@waywordradio.org. And find us on Facebook and Twitter at Wayword.