Journal Page by Austin Kleon

I love this journal page created by Austin Kleon! For an opening page to a journal, the message is wonderfully inviting, and writing in secret code is a fun concept.

Secret code reminds me of the book titled 'Code Girls' about the young, educated college women recruited by the U.S. military during World War II. Their job was to do codebreaking in which they took the place of men who'd done it before them--so the men could be moved into other positions-- even those in the theater of war/operations. The codes these women broke were difficult to near impossible to do and many involved 'keys' that affected how letters were to be decoded. The work involved math, attention to detail, and an ability to see relationships between totally different things that may have been seen at different times or in different places.

There was also a Star Trek: TNG episode where Picard meets an alien captain whose race can only communicate in allegory based on the race's native folklore. The alien captain and Picard are transported to a planet where they face this challenge in communicating. Picard learns that it is necessary to understand a species folklore in order to grasp the meaning of an allegorical language. Sounds like it could be a form of code too.

Getting back to a journal, what kind of secret code would you develop if you chose to use one? Would it be allegorical, pictorial, using letters of an alphabet with or without a 'key', an entirely new language/code you create, or something altogether different?

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Cay Denise

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