A Word From ...
The Hidden Heroes
During the Second World War, Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire was home to a group of people without whose efforts the war could have dragged on for many more years, costing millions more lives. Their work was not publicly recognized, however, until decades later. They were the codebreakers who deciphered the Nazis' machine-generated Enigma code, giving the Allies invaluable information about German positions, strength, and tactics. Among this group of translators, mathematicians, and other assorted geniuses was a man who was there by mistake. A recruiting officer had assumed that Geoffrey Tandy, a former curator at the Natural History Museum, was an expert in cryptograms. He was in fact a botanist who was an expert in a class of primitive plants called cryptogams.
The element crypto- in these words has the same meaning in both cases. It stems from the Greek word kruptos, meaning "hidden" or "secret", and forms part of a number of English words, mainly scientific. The words crypt and cryptic also derive from the Greek word.
The second element, -gram, in cryptogram comes from the Greek word gramma, meaning something written. So the whole word cryptogram literally means "a hidden piece of writing", or in other words, a message written in code. The science of deciphering cryptograms is cryptography, as practised by the cryptographers at Bletchley Park. The -gram part of cryptogram is the same element that appears in the words anagram, diagram, and telegram.
Without the 'r', you are left with a second element -gam, which comes from a different Greek word altogether: gamos, meaning "marriage". The word cryptogam literally means "hidden marriage", and was originally used by the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus in the 18th century to describe plants that had no obvious means of reproduction, i.e. no flowers or seeds. This group includes algae, ferns, lichens, and mosses.
Although Geoffrey Tandy was not an expert in codes, his presence nevertheless
provided an unexpected bonus. From his previous employment at the Natural History
Museum, he had access to drying paper used in the preservation of old documents.
When sodden codebooks were retrieved from captured German U-boats, he was able
to dry them carefully, so that the contents could be read without the books
disintegrating. These codebooks enabled Enigma to be broken much more easily,
thanks, in part, to a confusion over a letter 'r'.
 Find out more
about the Codebreakers
of Bletchley Park
08/10/2001
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