While thinking about what words can do, as signs and signifiers, why not also think about letters – in this case, of the English alphabet? Attached is a attached is an alphabet cipher by Lewis Carroll, which he apparently wrote in a magazine supplement explaining cryptography to children in 1868. Creepy.

But basically, I’m thinking of the space between the finite and the infinite that cryptography points to – the open and closed system of language, etc. And I’m thinking about this in light of Carroll’s invention of “new” words (not really “neologisms,” I would say, since the words clearly mean something) – like in Jabberwocky.

The cipher works like this. Each column forms a dictionary of symbols – “A,” “B,” etc. – where a “key word” (let’s say L-E-W-I-S-C-A-R-R-O-L L) can be spelled out (as many times as necessary to send the number of letters needed in a particular message). The letters that go down the rows will spell the message, and so the “code” is embedded in the boxes where the letters from the key word in the column intersect the letters in the message (e.g. where “L” and “K,” if that’s the first letter of your message, meet up would be coded as “v”).

So, if you receive
L E W I S C A R R O L L (key word)
V M J L G H C I V S A J (code)
K I… you should be able to decipher my (message).