SCRAMBLED WORDS

The movie Hidden Figures helped us reconsider our recent history and highlighted the part women, as well as men of color played in further our defence and science. The women in Hidden Figures were called computers because of the work they did with numbers. The space race would not have been won without them. Other women during World War II participated as spies and codebreakers for the U.S. and Britain. They used their puzzle-solving abilities to crack codes.

 Could you have been a codebreaker? Do you like word puzzles? Try this.

Do you know how many words in a paragraph start with the letter U?

There is no right answer to that question of course, but words that begin with U are not that common. After reading three paragraphs in the newspaper, I found only one word that started with U. Yet U words can have significant meanings.

Think of some words that start with U:

I picked these words because of their positive meanings.

Other U words:

All of those start with UN and connect to words that mean their exact opposite. You could write an interesting poem with just a list of U words:

Five days a week, I finish the mini crossword that the New York Times offers. Since the pandemic started, newspapers have filled their pages with fun things to do. Both the San Francisco Chronicle and the East Bay Times offer special sections of word puzzles. The NYT includes them in their new At Home section, which provides ideas to nurture creativity.

My favorite puzzles are CRYPTOGRAMS, a secret code puzzle that relies on your knowledge of the number of times a letter might appear in a sentence, what letters usually end words, and other tricks or rules of a language. Like a codebreaker, I start out looking for patterns, I look for three-letter words that could be THE and also single letters, which will either be A or I. E is one of the most used letters and often ends a word. THE is common too, though sometimes the puzzle master will give you three letters that turn out to be YOU instead. If I find an I, then I start looking for ING. Raymond Carver, the writer, tried to eliminate gerunds in his writing.  He wanted his writing to be direct. Instead of saying "I am going," he would say "I went." But not everyone writes like Carver and words ending in ING stand out. The letters B, F, and J are uncommon. You will need to discover more of the meaning of the sentence before you can uncover a B, F, or J word.

In the paragraph above, there are four words that start with U. Can you find them? In comparison, there are 20 words that begin with T.

Try this CRYPTOGRAM:

"N Q P I J   X F J G   F O   J E D P Q C J X   F E   G S   L J Q P A."    G. Y. T.   Y F O L J P

Hint: A equals T

Find a list of words that begin with U. Then send me your U poem.

Remember what Sherlock Holmes said, "The game is afoot."

You can find a list of words that start with U here: http://www.manythings.org/vocabulary/lists/l/words.php?f=3esl.21

If you like Cryptograms, check out the article in the Smithsonian Magazine about the women codebreakers in World War II:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-women-codebreakers-wwii-helped-win-war-180965058/

or read The Code Girls by Liza Mundy

https://www.alexanderbook.com/search/site/Code%20Girls

or 

The Alice Network by Kate Quinn

Spymistress by William Stevenson

The Woman Who Smashed Codes by Jason Fagone

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/takeaway/segments/remembering-women-who-helped-crack-japanese-code

"Service is the price you pay for the 'rent' you owe in this life, the space that you occupy on this earth."

Martin Luther King, Jr.