I’ve written before about how nineteenth century people sometimes obfuscated the text on postcards to hide a message from prying eyes, be it the maid servant, the postie or a family member.

I’ve just come across this nice example from the Highland Archives Centre in Inverness in Scotland

© Highlands Archive Centre

The obfuscation method is breathtakingly simple – move the first letter of the word to the end of the word and add the letter ‘a’ to the string.

So, while the first few strings read

ustja otga ourya ongla etterla

discarding the ‘a’ characters we get

ustj otg oury ongl etterl

and moving the last character to the start of the string gives

just got your long letter

I must say I’m quite taken with this scheme, and adding a final a to each string makes the short text look superficially as if it has been written in a language other than English…