Tuesday, May 12, 2009

secret code

Usually my dreams are mildy strange and not particularly noteworthy. Last night was one of those nights. I dreamed that I was going on a long road trip but I didn't have any plan on where to go, so I was looking at a US map to find the cities with the weirdest names and then I would plan a route through those cities... while doing this I found Banana, North Dakota and Zoooooo, Michigan (both not real, I would hope) and then I got to Illinois. On my dream map, Illinois was now suddenly shaped like Tennessee and they'd changed all the names of the cities to a number and a letter. For example, the capital was 1A and the surrounding cities were something like 8b, 7s and 4r. Except for Manhattan, oddly, the city in which Alan lives.


Today in my Theory class we were talking about Structuralism, and I was kind of nodding off a little bit, but then sometime near the end of class we started talking about words and meanings and how a word may have a few different meanings but our understanding of which meaning is being used is a social and contextual knowledge... then someone brought up the book "Frindle" about the kid who renamed the pen to be a frindle, and how easily it was able to catch on, and then someone else brought up an assignment she'd had as a senior in highschool where her pyschology class had to invent a word and start using it in the hallways/cafeteria and whatnot to see if they could make it a new slang term within their school...

...and then THAT reminded me of when I was in middle school, a handful of friends and I had this code we used to pass notes. We basically came up with new symbols for all 26 letters of the alphabet and used them in notes we'd pass to each other so that if our notes were intercepted by anyone else they wouldn't be able to read it and our secrets would be safe. We used it so often that we became really fluent in our little secret written language and even though it only existed on paper, it was still an entirely new language that we invented for ourselves.

I'm not sure how ANY of this relates to structuralism, but the point is I'd forgotten how innovative I was as a child. It's a shame I was such a terrible pre-pubescent girl back then, using my powers for evil. You are all very lucky to know now!Kristina and not then!Kristina. I'm much nicer. ^_^

14 comments:

Jordiekins said...

I always have weird dreams. It's kind of annoying.

In middle school, we always used a code where we rearranged the alphabet:
A=r B=s C=t D=u E=v F=w G=x H=y I=z J=a K=b L=c M=d N=e O=f P=g Q=h R=i S=j T=k U=l V=m W=n X=o Y=p Z=q

"Z nrek kf sv Dij. Evizdfe..."
That must be distracting, how did you manage to write a blog post?

loveacrosstheocean said...

a. I loved "Frindle!"
b. Zooooo, Michigan isn't a city, but Kalamazoo is, and people who go to school there often refer to it as "the zoo" so it's kind of real? one may even say it's a secret code... hmm.
c. I like your tags : )

janitorbud said...

i love your tag for this post.
i always tried to make a new language with my friends but we never succeeded. i'm horrible at secretly passing notes and remembering languages.
my mom used to talk to her best friend on the phone starting every word with "r" trying to confuse me. let me tell you, i was one brilliant child because i soon figured her out! ^_^

ifmemoryserves said...

That's kind of weird because my friend was just telling me this morning about a really weird dream she had last night. It was really complicated, but the jist of it is she was with this big group of people in some abandoned house type area and there was this little girl who they were trying to save because apparently she was going to be attacked/kidnapped by some man. So they were going around trying to find this man by using clues in notes that someone was leaving. What she eventually found out in the dream was that the girl was Schizophrenic and was actually leaving all the notes/clues herself.

When she told me about it it seemed hilarious (the way she told it, anyways) but she said she was actually terrified when she woke up.

Hayley Hoover said...

Jess and I invented a sign language at one point, but the only word either of us remembers is "poop."

VicMorrowsGhost said...

The suburbs around Paris are named with numbers. Like District 1, 2, 3 etc. Perhaps your dream was telling you to move to Paris?

Matt said...

I need to stop reading the tags on your blog posts. I get insongnia every time that I do. :(

SimplyAin said...

i tried to create my own language but since i was alone in doing so it didn't really get to far.

but it did decode the Al Bhed language in FFX 1&2

does that count for anything?

Elizabeth... said...

My best friend and I had both a written and spoken code, both completely different up until about 8 years old we were pretty much fluent.
The only code I still know off by heart is Gnommish from the Artemis Fowl books. It's really useful and also pretty nerdy.
:D

Me said...

My brother and I once tried to make up our own language so that people we didn't like wouldn't understand what we were saying. We gave up once we realised just how huge the English language is.

Anonymous said...

to elizabeth... (that's how your username shows up, i don't know) who knows gnommish, that's...after two+ years of being in the fandom i despise the word awesome with a passion but that's the word that came to mind. i love artemis fowl. k.

in middle school a select few of us spoke gibberish. outside of school me and my best friend spoke the i-top language. it's basically spelling everything out as you talk. so kristina your name would be "kop rop i-top sop top i-top nop a-top". we were so exhilarated with this language we didn't even mind how damn annoying it was to speak it.

Emily said...

I kind of want to hear stories of evil!Kristina now. How mean WAS then!Kristina exactly? ;]

Sarah Rose said...

Theres a town called Sandwich in Illinois. Apparently thats where the party scene is. XD I got told all about on my way to Terminus.

Sammie said...

In grade 4 my two friends and I made up a code too. it basically consisted of happy faces, hearts, starts and swirlies. It took so long to read the note, but we thought we were so brilliant.