I read the following headline recently: “SF Mayor Targets ‘Bulls*** that has Destroyed our City”. I think we all, at least initially, feel good about ourselves when we solve these coded word puzzles. Eventually though we likely think, “Why do I even know that word? Why was I able to solve that puzzle?”
There doesn’t seem to be any consistency as to how many letters have to be encoded. I’ve tried to figure out the rhyme or reason to this over the years. I used to think that, the worse the word, the more encoded it would be, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. It’s a tough decision for the writer ‘cause if you encode too many of the letters you can’t figure out the word, but if you only encode, say, one letter, it doesn’t disguise the word enough…
I had a friend in high school who encoded the bad words when he spoke. He often used to say "H E double toothpicks for the word "h***". I never liked being in his pew when we recited The Apostle's Creed at church.
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