Thursday, June 02, 2005

Sending Secret Messages

It has been said
That which costs little is less valued.
--- Miguel de Cervantes

That is that people tend to undervalue things that cost them little. The cost of a thing may be in money, yet this is not the only way that cost is calculated. Time and effort are also used to deteremine cost and are often considered more pecious than money. The correllary is that a higher cost brings a higher value. Something that cost a lot of money, or took a lot of time and effort, is held with higher regard.

Saying "thank you" or even writing "I love you" can be easily dismissed. Its not the sentiment is not sincere, but that the message costs little in the sending and in the receiving. If the cost of sending the message and the cost of receiving the message are increased, the message itself will be more valued.

The cost here is not in money, but in time and effort. A previous post discussed coded messages. By using a secret code, you can send a message that will have a higher value because of the increased effort in writing it and reading it. Here are a few ideas:
  • Verses from the bible. Just send the reference and have your sweetie look them up.
  • ROT-13 is a simple code in which letters of the alphabet are replaced by other letters. Click here for a web page to do the converting for you and wikipedia has instructions for decoding it manually.
  • Use a different alphabet to write like cirith.
  • A message treasure hunt. Create the message as a set of instructions for finding the words that form the message. The clues would be: book page paragraph word. For instance: Moby Dick, page 1, paragraph 1, word 1 = Call.
  • Do the last one using bible book, chapter, verse and word.
Gubh funyg syveg srebpvbhfyl rnpu qnl jvgu gul fcbhfr gung gul zneevntr funyy or oyrffrq jvgu fgeratgu, wbl naq ybatrivgl.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

you know what? my husband a few years ago wrote "i love you" on a little heart, that he taped to a lipstick of mine.

that morning (he had already left for work) when i was getting ready, i found it. and it made me sooo happy!!!!