Word: alphabetization
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...letters to Cicero, Julius Caesar employed a cipher in which each character was replaced by one standing three places down the alphabet-thus D stood for a, E for b, F for c, etc. Mary Queen of Scots wrote conspiratory messages in cipher; when intercepted and interpreted by England's first great cryptanalyst, Thomas Phelippes, they helped bring Mary to the chopping block. In the U.S., Benedict Arnold employed several codes, including one that was keyed to Volume I of the fifth Oxford edition of Blackstone's Commentaries...
...produced an astonishingly thorough study. He deals not only with the codebreakers but also with the codemakers and nearly everyone of any consequence who has ever used codes-or seriously thought about them. As he guides the reader through the difficulties of steganography (invisible ink, microdots), monalphabetics (simple, one-alphabet systems, such as the one described in the box, next page), and polyalphabetics (many alphabets used in the same cipher message), Kahn keeps his subject lively and even dramatic. He describes, for example, how cryptology helped get the U.S. into one world war- and helped shorten another...
...David Kahn writes: "To the casual observer, they may look as alike as troops lined up for inspection, but just as the sergeant knows his men as 'the gold-brick,' 'the kid,' 'the reliable soldier,' so the cryptanalyst knows the letters of the alphabet...
...Telegrams at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., announced the existence of the new comet. It was the 14th discovered during 1967, one more than the previous yearly record of 13. In honor of the discoverers, the Smithsonian named it Ikeya-Seki 1967n (the 14th letter in the alphabet). The new Ikeya-Seki, the Smithsonian reported, had a brightness of only the ninth magnitude and would gradually fade away without becoming visible to the naked...
...from the Carnegie Corporation to reanalyze data from 67 major studies on reading, to visit over 300 classrooms, and to interview proponents of various theories on the teaching of reading. She concluded that children learn to read better when taught by a "decoding method.'- on which emphasizes learning the alphabet and breaking the codes of written words in their first few years of instruction...