Twenty years after her grandmother died, Jane Ohm (along with her brother, two cousins, and her father) still had the coded notes she left behind without any way to decipher them. When her father rediscovered one of them earlier this week, Ohm decided to post the series of seemingly random letters on the website Ask.MetaFilter, the New Yorker reported. A sample line went like this:
"PDGNHBOBVPNSNHANAOENCNANHPNCPND, NUOCP"
"This is a crazy long shot," Ohm wrote as a closing to her Ask.MetaFilter introduction, which also included possible clues like her grandmother's birth year, the theory that the letters might be song lyrics, and the presence of every letter in the alphabet but Z, X, and Q, "but I've seen Mefites pull off some pretty impressive code-breaking before!"
Site visitors cracked it in approximately twelve minutes. Based on the New Yorker's account, they didn't even need a complex code-breaking system, but clever intuition. The give-away was the note's ending letter, "A" and the combination, "AAA", which one user presumed stood for "Amen" and "Amen, Amen, Amen," respectively. Working off that, another breaker ventured that TYAGF stood for "Thank You Almighty God." Eventually, the notes were decoded into traditional Christian prayers.
Probably, as New Yorker blogger Casey N. Cep surmised, the prayers were written in shorthand not to fool their future owners, but as a way to maintain the memory of the writer, who was dying of brain concern and lost her ability to speak, in the least physically taxing way (thus, not having to write out all the words). Perhaps the abbreviations were even something of a game or a pleasing brain exercise.
Hohm decided not to post the rest of her grandmother's notes, the reasons for which she posted to Ask.MetaFilter on Tuesday.
"At this point, I don't think much more can or should be deciphered .... I'm O.K. leaving a little mystery with this one."
