{"id":18070,"date":"2019-11-13T09:23:55","date_gmt":"2019-11-13T17:23:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=18070"},"modified":"2019-11-11T18:36:43","modified_gmt":"2019-11-12T02:36:43","slug":"hiemal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2019\/11\/13\/hiemal\/","title":{"rendered":"hiemal"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>I just skimmed a 32-page booklet called <cite>Cryptogram Solving<\/cite>, by M. E. Ohaver, published in 1933. It demonstrated to me that there is more to solving the kinds of cryptograms that used to run in newspapers than just applying the frequency table; but it also demonstrated to me that I don\u2019t really want to learn how to solve them well, because it looks like you have to memorize a bunch of stuff about common digrams and other common letter patterns in English.<\/p>\r\n<p>I also learned a new word, from one of the sample cryptogram solutions in the booklet: <i>hiemal<\/i>, which my dictionary tells me means \u201cwintry.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p>Which seemed appropriate for this week, given the arctic blast that\u2019s hitting the US this week.<\/p>\r\n<p>(The word comes from Latin, and is related to <i>hibernate<\/i>.)<\/p>\r\n<p>The full plaintext of the cryptogram that included that word:<\/p>\r\n<blockquote>\r\n<p>Spectral snow-whirls spiral over starlit plain, hiemal winds sough past dismal housetop, umbral clouds scud along bleak horizon, when winter comes.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n<p>I assumed that that was a quote from something, but if so, it\u2019s not something that I can find online.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ciphers-secret-writing","category-new-to-me-words"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18070"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18070\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18073,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18070\/revisions\/18073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}