The webcomic “Order of the Stick”. for a while, had a character who was unable to speak intelligibly as the result of a curse. This character’s speech bubbles were full of meaningless strings of letters. However, as I read it it became pretty clear that there was some kind of substitution going on. It was a simple substitution cipher, so it was possible with some effort to make sense of this character’s dialogue. The cipher would change every few strips, and I’m not aware of any clue or key given within the comic itself.
Figuring out how to read this had a little to do with knowing the typical frequency of letters in English, but was probably more down to context (predicting what the character might say) and the fact that the length and capitalization of the words remained intact.
I just checked an old episode there, and was very quickly able to decipher the unintelligible dialogue, but this was almost entirely down to knowing the context. I remember when I initially read it, I more or less memorized the ciphers without specific effort.
Predicting what a rot13ed text might say could be a factor, and in my experience it was not particularly difficult to assimilate similar ciphers once I was reasonably confident my decryptions were correct.
A more lowbrow example:
The webcomic “Order of the Stick”. for a while, had a character who was unable to speak intelligibly as the result of a curse. This character’s speech bubbles were full of meaningless strings of letters. However, as I read it it became pretty clear that there was some kind of substitution going on. It was a simple substitution cipher, so it was possible with some effort to make sense of this character’s dialogue. The cipher would change every few strips, and I’m not aware of any clue or key given within the comic itself.
Figuring out how to read this had a little to do with knowing the typical frequency of letters in English, but was probably more down to context (predicting what the character might say) and the fact that the length and capitalization of the words remained intact.
I just checked an old episode there, and was very quickly able to decipher the unintelligible dialogue, but this was almost entirely down to knowing the context. I remember when I initially read it, I more or less memorized the ciphers without specific effort.
Predicting what a rot13ed text might say could be a factor, and in my experience it was not particularly difficult to assimilate similar ciphers once I was reasonably confident my decryptions were correct.