Secret Languages and Codes

At public school (P.S. 164 on Fourteenth Avenue) and in cheder (Machzike Talmud Torah on 42^nd Street) we had a series of secret codes which we thought were invented by the gang and unknown to anyone else.  These included using Hebrew letters to write out English words, eating selected buttons from long strips of sugar candy to make patterns resembling Braille, and making up special words and eccentric ways of pronouncing these lexical units.  Before I begin to explain ciphers and why we used them, I must warn you that all of them had one terrible drawback, which nevertheless did not prevent us from playing at spies.  The reason they could never be proper secret languages or alphabets was that none of us could remember from day-to-day what the code consisted of.  Actually, it might be best to explain this failure as arising from a series of weaknesses: (1) the inconsistency of usage, which is related to (2) general forgetfulness; but then also (3) our incomplete knowledge or mastery of the Hebrew aleph-bet, English spelling rules, and a general understanding of who we were, where we were, and what the world was all about.

            However, once this is said, the real point is that we had a lot of fun.  It never entered our minds that any teachers, male or female, other pupils not part of our gang, our own parents or other adult persons could see what we were doing or hear us when we giggled outrageously, rolled on the schoolroom floor with laughter, and threw rolled-up pieces of paper at one another.  Our games surrounded us like a holy cloud of unknowing.  But let me return now to the three codes we played with because, nebech, when you look back from already sixty years, the hilarity and intricate rules can be seen to have had an important cultural history and spiritual function. 

How so?

            Nu, like I should really know? 

However, notwithstanding all this necessary ambiguity and confusion, it goes like this, my explanation: writing out secret messages in English using Hebrew letters was not so different from what our ancestors did when they moved around through the Galut and had to deal with all kinds of goyim and bizarre idolatrous cultures, uncanny languages in weird alphabets and a host of hostile political things.  Whether Greek, Latin or Arabic, these great-great-great grandparents wrote their messages using the script they knew—aleph, bet, gimel and so forth—and especially when they knew the others, may they all chalish, could not understand.  So it was a serious and dangerous game of dissimulation, disguise and trickery, carried out for protection of the self and family, self-enhancement of community, and mockery of those who made our lives a misery.

Button codes are another matter.  It could look like Morse Code (or as we thought it was pronounced Morris Kotex) or Braille writing or maybe (existing already although not yet known to us) computer punch-cards.  But the thing of it was, and maybe still is, that what it said in itself didn’t matter a bit, only that you bit out a pattern and pretended, and the pretence was all that mattered, although the taste of what you got to eat was not so bad either.  Now what became clear much later was that in a way it was like an ancient Hebrew manuscript on parchment or vellum or papyrus, or rather, it was what would make that text readable, since by itself it lacked the dots and dashes and curly things that the Masoretes added for directions on voicing the consonants which were otherwise unpronounceable.  So what we had were the vowels by themselves, and we could pronounce all we wanted, even if what we said was nonsense or worse.  And what is worse than nonsense?  Saying something you don’t realize you are saying.  Maybe therefore we did say something or maybe not.  If we thought we did, that is one thing.  If not, and we really spoke profound mysteries and the world changed because of us, oh boy! will we get in trouble.  A for instance would be: Jonah when he wandered through the streets of Nineveh, he repeated some of the prophetic warning words but not all, just a grumpy ungracious mumbling, and yet all the crowds, including the children and the cattle, understood, understood better than he did, and you know what happened then, or rather what didn’t happen.  Maybe with us too.  You think so? 

And last of all our mishmash language invented in our games, and also, again as it becomes evident in the perspective of hindsight and mature reflection, our rediscovery of words and allusions totally outside of our knowledge and comprehension.   Take a word like gummaschlach or shimalechem—what could they mean?  For us, little idiots that we were, a gummachlach was at once a big clump of old dirty snow on the street you could pick up and tossed at someone and at the same time the noise you made when you threw it.  And shimalechem was the picture you drew with a finger on a person’s back during the incantatory beginnings of a game such as hang-go (or hang-go-sick or hide-and-go-seek).  Not so much a drawing as a circle in the middle of which all or some or one person stuck in his finger, and then everyone chanted “My finger did it.  My finger did it,” and the IT person had to guess who was the finger-putter-in or be liable to tricks and mocking songs all afternoon.  Some people think shimalechem is nothing but a form of simulacrum and the whole game a relic of archaic magic.  Big deal!  We thought it meant something much more kabbalistic and humorous.  We could have been right.  And gummaschlach had nothing to do with latex or rubber sticking to anything, and the application to clumps of snow or street fights was purely fortuitous.  You never know for sure with coded language.

So right, even if you think you understand what I said, you probably don’t, and the reason is that I don’t think I did then or now, although, as I keep trying to say, it doesn’t matter—because the “it” that doesn’t have a meaning is less important than the process of being able to manipulate language and sentences and thus the whole world.