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[Blixxt]

[SOLVED] #206 Black - Mexid Massege

[JamesDart]

Well, the word origin unscrambles to Luthianian. There can't be that many Luthianian words that long... I hope.

Scratch that, its Lithuanian.

[darklord]

[JamesDart]

Nice, you just beat me. Does this really seem like a black-worthy puzzle to you?

[darklord]

If there was no such thing as the internet and you had to page through a Lithuanian dictionary counting letters but no not really...

[Blixxt]

So should I mark this as solved?

[BrianEnigma]

[darklord]

Bri:

from this page


4) Clive Tooth has found what may be most ambiguous jumbled sentence (using words like "salt" which becomes "slat" when transposed)

"The sprehas had ponits and patles"

This might come out as...

The sherpas had pitons and plates.

The shapers had points and pleats.

The seraphs had pintos and petals.

The sphaers had pinots and palets.

The sphears had potins and peltas.

Clive lists some of the more obscure words in this set of possible readings:

palets: paleae (a part of a grass flower)

peltas: shields

pinots: grapes

potins: copper alloys

sphaers, sphears: both old form of 'spheres'

[KSG]

I would definitely say yes, Blixxt. This appears to be solved.

[questionboy]

sorry to put a fly in the ointment but i agree that this is too easy for a black card...???

should we just close the case or be looking deeper

[RobDixon]

This card has a couple of misspellings/typos in it. I wonder if they could indicate another code of some kind?

For example, in the third line the word IPRMOETNT is supposed to mean IMPORTANT, but really it would unscamble to IMPORTENT.

In the second to last line the words WAHT IS SAYS are supposed to mean WHAT IT SAYS, but it says IS not IT.

In the first line of paragraph two, the word academy is not capitalized -- but it always is on the PCA web pages.

These could be proofreading mistakes of course.

Still, BriEnigma indicated above that the spelling of supercalifagilisticexpialidocious might be one letter off too.

I haven't checked each letter in the 38-letter Lithuanian word yet (but it does have 38 letters in it).

Can anyone else spot missing or incorrect letters on this card?

[RobDixon]

Apparently the first paragraph is taken from an email/blog "meme" that went around the Internet in September 2003. A writer from Salon.com introduced various spelling and word changes as a "meme experiment" and tracked their progress using Google: http://blogs.salon.com/0001092/2003/09/15.html

The version on this card doesn't match any of his three variations exactly. For example, it removes the words "an English University" and changes "This is because we do not read every letter..." to "this is because the human mind does not read every letter...". (Maybe differentiating the Perplex mind from the human mind?).

The card version keeps the misspelling of IMPORTENT though.

So either

1) This proves that the misspellings are meaningless errors, just like in the original text, or

2) This indicates that there probably is more to it, and we're supposed to realize that the inaccuracies on this card are deliberate and important

Gee, that narrows it down...

[cassandra]

Yup, there are 2 U's in Supercali.

So maybe "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is important"?

[StarryNight]

At the top of the card, there are black marks that look like someone took a pencil and darkened in the top part of the card by scribbling.

However, the bottom of this is a series of lines at odd angles that sometimes look like letters. In particular, the following portion looks like "4:45 PM" or "4:15 PM".

[Priesy]

NEWBIE HERE
Hope i'm not trying to look too far beyond the obvious but just found a different link
http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/personal/matt.davis/Cmabrigde/
note Cambridge university named as the english university which carried out the study don't know how relevant if at all but still looking