Fragments from a Life in Cryptolinguistics
i.
I remember my first encounter with the Proto-Aryan tongue, the ancient and never-recorded language that we now call, in the wake of Hitler’s madness, Proto–Indo-European. My father’s leather-bound Surrow’s English Etymological Dictionary contained, at the eventual end of each tangle of an entry, a mysterious Proto-Aryan root, *bhegw-, *pleus-. An introduction, difficult for me to follow at age ten, explained that Proto-Aryan was the spring whence flowed all the languages my neighbors spoke: the guttural scowling Kraut at the meat shop, Officer O’Donough, our charming maid Jeanette, Mrs. Lopez the washer woman, even funny Mr. Ramakrishna. With visions of reconstructing this tongue that preceded Babel, I began carefully copying each root from the dictionary, together with the words it had become—in order to get a rough idea of the root’s original meaning. Then I sought to arrange the roots alphabetically, generating, essentially, a Proto-Aryan dictionary out of an English one. Surely, this, the mother of all tongues, would, once brought to light (by my efforts), bring understanding to all the nations of the earth, harmony to the clang of their myriad tongues. After several months and the completion of the D section my father, finally understanding the nature of my project, presented me as a birthday present with Edmund Jones’ nineteenth-century Basic Aryan Lexicon. He probably thought it would come as a godsend, but instead it shattered all my hopes. Ante-Babel had already been discovered. It had been known for decades and hadn’t changed a thing. From that moment my life was predetermined: I would henceforth seek to only conceal and obfuscate our language, and hide it from prying eyes.
ii.
During the War I did my part in our cryptography department. My great battles were with bureaucracy and the ineptitude of my colleagues; my great success (although not the one for which I will be remembered) was the development of a code that American POWs in the Pacific Theater could use to communicate with each other while befuddling the Japanese. Our servicemen were taught a simple variation of Morse Code with the syllable “la” substituting for the dot, “ra” for the dash. In this way, GIs could discuss plans for escape or boost morale with racy jokes while their Jap captors heard only “Ra ra ra ra ra ra ra ra…” “What silly people these Americans are,” the Japanese said to each other in Japanese, “that they are ever singing nonsense songs, ra ra ra,” none the wiser. La la la. Ra ra ra. La la la.
iii.
Much has been made recently of our wartime use of Navajos as “code-talkers.” They were chosen because they were only large American Indian group not studied by any European linguist, and therefore spoke the only “safe” language—but fears developed, as the war stretched on, that a certain Dr. Friedrich Einbar, that eminent German anthropologist who did field work among the Apache in 1911, may have jotted down a note or two on Navajo as well. Some officials demanded that a substitute language be found. Roosevelt himself had the idea, based on a rather sensational article he’d read in the Saturday Evening Post about twins who communicated in a secret tongue only to each other—surely such twins could be used to transmit and decode impenetrable messages. Perhaps the Dionne quintuplets could be drawn into the service! He handed me his eager proposal personally, in a leather envelope lined with black velvet. I bowed when I took it and he bowed back, deeply at the waist, without rising.
My subsequent investigation, sponsored by the US Army, found that twins do not and cannot, in fact, develop their own language. They merely develop a system of substitutions, replacing all [p] sounds with [t] and vice-versa (for example) in a kind of oral cryptogram which may serve to stymie parents but is no harder to “break” than schoolboys’ Pig Latin. By the time I had written up my conclusions I had to deliver them to President Truman. The Dionne quints did a few promotional posters for the cryptography department, but it ended there.
iv.
But if ever I served my country well, it was during the Cold War, when, working with the admirable Ridgefield team, I developed a coding device that confounded the Russkies for three long years, a record, I believe, in this century. The government introduced the device to Americans as a “toy” and backed with an artificially generated “fad” (to create a plausible reason for spies and servicemen to be seen carrying the damn things). We even invented the back story that it had been invented in Eastern Europe—how the Commies preened at this fiction! It was vulgarly known as the “Rubik’s Cube,” but we cognoscenti called it the Johnson Device.
It functioned thus: an agent in the field would set his cube in one of three hundred established starting positions. Then focusing on one of six sides (distinguishable by the color of its middle square), he would engage in a series of twists until a certain pattern emerged. The agent would then record not the pattern, but the twists required to generate that pattern. Which pattern would serve as the starting position for the next code element, engendered through another recorded sequence of twists; etc. Each type of twist had several interchangeable secret names: a horizontal quarter twist of the top row, for example, might be designated as L, V, or 7. When the message was sent, the decoder would use his own Johnson device to follow the transmitted instructions, twisting his cube to create pattern after pattern, wherein lay actual text. A skilled “cube-talker” could encode lengthy messages in a matter of minutes. An elementary exercise from the top-secret booklet used in training is reproduced below.
7. Given a “solved” cube of all solid colors, generate these text faces and record the twist-path used:
XOX XXX XOO XXX
XXX XXO XOO XXX
XOX XXX XXX XOO
Red cryptanalysts fumbled and stumbled, unable to discover our secret. In WWII the Polish underground captured a German Enigma Machine, and a British study of its mechanisms enabled the Allies to crack the Nazi code. The Russians became convinced we had a similar machine, but as much as they searched our diplomats and agents, they could find nothing. Oh sure, they often found Rubik’s Cubes, but so what? They also found blue jeans. By the time the Reds stumbled across the solution (a careless clue left too prominently in an East Berlin embassy) the cube fad had become hard to maintain back home. The television ads, the free cubes distributed to public schools, were becoming expensive. Operation Johnson Device was canceled in 1982.
v.
Saussure (I learned from a book a senator presented me with at a banquet), after inventing modern linguistics, devoted his life to deciphering a nonexistent code he had hallucinated in the poems of Catullus. A Sloan’s Latin Grammar in one hand, a copy of “Da mi basia” in the other, he published paper after paper detailing the progress he was making on the code, the secrets he was learning from Roman poets….About linguistics he never published a word. The book attributed to him was compiled by his students from class notes three years after his death.
I am aware that colleagues and my hectoring wife now compare me to Saussure. But they have misunderstood my words—corrupt as my speech has become, an almost indecipherable slur since last winter’s second stroke. As I sift through these brittle pages, left for eighty-five years tucked between two pages in the Surrow’s English Etymological Dictionary I inherited from my father, I am not seeking a code, or a solution to a code. I know full well nothing was encrypted in the pencil scrawls of my youth. When I said I sought meaning (it is too difficult to clarify this to them, who will not listen) I merely meant that I wanted to find, in these faded scraps of nostalgia, an echo of the dream of my youth—that the nonsensical babble of a thousand tongues could be quelled by the discovery of the Ursprache, that the true names of things could be stated, that for once and finally things could be said and they would have meaning. I sought the hope, the vain hope, that my vile life’s work might yet fail.
