MAGNAT-DEBON

Miscommunications, garbled conversations, unintelligible blog posts, these are all products of the digital age, or rather its unintentional by-products. Sometimes though, pains are taken to purposely confuse a message and this can lead to unintended consequences. The case of the phrase, “The world wonders”, is a famous example of this.

“The world wonders” was a phrase used as security padding in an encrypted message sent to Admiral Halsey, during WWII. The full message was, “Where is Task Force 34? The world wonders.” The padding words were intended to be without meaning, and were added to hinder Japanese attempts at cryptanalysis, but were mistakenly included in the decoded message handed to Halsey and interpreted by him as a harsh and sarcastic rebuke. Halsey dropped his pursuit of a Japanese carrier task force and turned back.

Growing up, there were various techniques that could be employed to obfuscate the message. If you were old enough, you could hide your meaning from younger siblings, by spelling out the words. This method had a limited shelf life, but on the other hand, it helped to encourage your younger brothers and sisters to learn to spell. Next up was pig Latin.

Ownay oughthay, erethay areway automatedway igpay Atinlay anslatorstray atthay areway availableway orfay eefray onway ethay ebway.

Immigrant parents could wield their native tongue, in front of their Americanized children, but this could also result in the unintended consequence of immersing the children even deeper into American pop culture and there by obtaining an analogous level of unintelligibility. Come to think of it, even native born American parents can suffer from this problem.

Finally, there is the technique of pronouncing the words backwards. I remember doing this with Anne and her cousins. I was Kram and she was Enna. I was never as good at this as Anne was, but I don’t think that she ever held a candle to the above YouTube video girl’s talent.

Sed lacus. Donec lectus. Nullam pretium nibh ut turpis. Nam bibendum. In nulla tortor, elementum vel, tempor at, varius non, purus. Mauris vitae nisl nec metus placerat consectetuer. Donec ipsum. Proin imperdiet est. Phasellus dapibus semper urna. Pellentesque ornare, orci in consectetuer hendrerit, urna elit eleifend nunc, ut consectetuer nisl felis ac diam.

In publishing, lorem ipsum is filler text commonly used to demonstrate the graphics elements, such as font and layout. The lorem ipsum text is typically a section of a Latin text by Cicero with words altered, added and removed that make it nonsensical in meaning and not proper Latin.

I guess that you could say that the underlying theme of this post is talking nonsense. This is what you get, when there is no news to report and I haven’t spun out on to one of my rants. I’ll try to come to my senses by tomorrow, but anyway, the reader should always beware.