I have a very important message for all of you. You ready?

C's fund up,

is four, if's foot.

You get that?

If you know what I just said,

if you know what I just said, my hat is off to you because that was not a message in another language.

That was an encrypted message which translates directly to Welcome to Young Heretics.

And I really shouldn't say that it translates.

I should say that it decodes to Young Hertics.

Each letter stands in for the letter before it in the alphabet.

And the reason I did that is because I got a question today from Nathan

about encoding and decoding encrypted messages.

And I thought this was such a cool addition to our ongoing words, words,

words, words, discussion about how different things get communicated and

written down and sent around that I couldn't resist talking about it.

So here we go.

Nathan writes, as you've talked about the physical and visual representations of language,

are there ancient examples of writing or language systems deliberately meant to obscure their meaning?

Typically, language is meant to enhance communication and

transmission of information, however sometimes it is important to hide the

meaning from outsiders. I'm thinking of the tap code used by POWs in World War II

in Vietnam or when soldiers used our own symbols instead of the normal

...