Long past time for a little silliness here. When I was (I think) five or maybe six, the Latin Mass was the only Mass, and I remember wondering what the priest was saying but especially what the choir was singing. The choir, having a dozen or so members, was louder than the celebrant—and, well, fuzzier. So consider the Agnus Dei, which was one of the numerous things the choir sang during High Mass at our church in that era:
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi
Miserere nobis
What I heard was a little different:
On this day, they told us we got a moonbeam.
We say, “Hey, we know this.”
This was repeated three times. The fourth stanza ended in “Dona nobis pacem,” and in truth I don’t recall what I heard in that. I got a kid missal when I started grade school, and that put an end to the mystery.
But I was thinking of that when a sort of puzzle occurred to me: Using words to encode other words when both sets of words used (mostly) the same phonemes. That’s basically what I did with the Agnus Dei. The encoded version would be nonsense, of course, but if read could suggest the original.
I was reminded of something called a rebus, which you don’t see much anymore: The use of small pictures or icons to represent phonemes. Decades ago, I drew a rebus on a valentine card I gave to Carol. Above my signature, I drew a picture of a bumblebee and a tunnel with tracks running out of it. Carol looked at the valentine, giggled, and said, “Be cave?” It’s been an inside joke between us ever since.
So consider this encoded stanza of a forgettable and mostly forgotten pop song from the early 70s. You don’t need to remember the song to decode the puzzle. (If you do remember the song, well, you’re probably as old as I am, and just as into goofy pop music.)
Hare shawl deer swear bear
Anne eye dried nought two stair
win isle luck tatter tulips.
See if you can decode it. The phonemes aren’t absolutely identical between the uncoded and coded text, which makes it harder to decode and thus more of a puzzle.
I call this sort of puzzle rebus-ish, since it’s a rebus done with language, and not pictures, nor single letters, which are called gramograms, as in the canonical gramogram conversation:
FUNEX?
S,VFX.
FUNEM?
S,VFM.
OK,LFMNX.
I do wonder if somebody else has put forth this kind of puzzle and coined a word for it. I’ve never seen anything of that sort. Independent invention is a thing. I independently invented the blog in the late 90s, having never seen the word nor read one of the (very few) blogs that predated my VDM Diary.
So see how long it takes you to figure it out. And if you’re so inclined, concoct one of your own and post it in the comments. Try it!
