"Terra" is Rot13:"Green" | Hacker News Reader

"Terra" is Rot13:"Green"

nielsenhayden.com

Some observations:

[tang ⇔ gnat] are not only the ROT13 of each other, but also the inverse of each other. It seems these two properties coincide in this pair only.

I'm also surprised that the longest pair is [nowhere ⇔ abjurer] at 7 letters, with [terra ⇔ green] being second with 5.

He limited it to words that weren't "Scrabble words", that is, ones he recognized. Another rot13 pair of length 7 are purpura⇔Chechen, in my /usr/shared/dict/words. Pairs of length 6 are, cheery⇔purrel (what is 'purrel'?), greeny⇔terral (what is 'terral'?), orphan⇔becuna ('becuna' is a type of fish?).

I had to Google "purrel -purell" to track that down, and even then it wasn't an immediate hit.

According to WordNik.com, which cites the "Century Dictionary", a purrel is "A list ordained to be at the end of kersies to prevent deceit in diminishing their length."

Wasn't that helpful?! According to Wiktionary, a kersie is Afrikaans for cherry.

Ergo a purrel is a list at the end of cherries to prevent lies about their length. Clear as mud, eh?

(Yes, none of this is helpful at all, but I'm cracking up)

http://www.wordnik.com/words/purrel http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kersie

That's the same conclusion I found, using the same tools. I tried something different this time and searched for "purrel oed". Managed to find a citation from c 1617 in "The Acts and Ordinances of the Eastland Company". "Noe brother of this Companya .. shall .. halfe or Cut .. in the myddle of any Cloth .. Nor shall after the Laste daye of August 1618 shipp any Cloth into Th'eastparts which shall have two purrells or a particon in the middle."

I think I just added more mud.

Also, Rot13 contains the longest pair.

Here's a list of all words (in sowpods.txt) of six or more letters which translate in rot-N for some N:

   1   anteed   bouffe
   1   azlons   bampot
   4   ganjah   kernel
   4   lallan   pepper
   6   fusion   layout
   6   alohas   grungy
   6   jigjig   pompom
   6   bombyx   hushed
   6   mulmul   sarsar
   7   inkier   purply
   7   manful   thumbs
  10   muumuu   weewee
  13   cravat   pening
  13   harira   uneven
  13  abjurer  nowhere

(sowpods.txt is at http://code.google.com/p/scrabblehelper/source/browse/trunk/...)

This suggests a fun interview problem:

Junior engineers: here is an English dictionary. What words in the English dictionary have a ROT13 representation which is also in the dictionary?

Senior engineers: here is an English dictionary. What words in the English dictionary have a ROT13 representation which is also in the dictionary AND that fact would be amusing to people.

Terra means Earth in Portuguese... (and also means soil, land)

It's a well-known word for Earth in English, too.

Yes, it comes from the Latin. So maybe this is not a coincidence, since Julius Caesar invented the ROT13 cipher.

No, ROT3, not 13, and he was missing J, V, W.

Also, he had no idea what "earth" means.

What do you imply by that?

He had no idea what the modern English word "earth" means, even if he somehow could have stumbled upon it.

Greek astronomers knew the earth was spherical around the 6th century BC (easily deduced by observing ships sailing in the Mediterranean, as well as the visibility of the stars at different latitudes) and had already demonstrated that the moon was a sphere 150 years before Ceasar's reign. Pliny records that Gaius Sulpicius Gallus enjoyed promotion for winning a battle by correctly predicting an eclipse and timing his military action around it, also before Ceasar's birth. Around the same time, Seleucus (who lived in what we now call Iraq) postulated that the earth orbited the sun rather than vice versa.

Ceasar himself was interested in astronomy, to the extent that he replaced the previous Roman calendar with the Julian Calendar (a modification of the Egyptian Solar calendar), the first to feature a year of 365 days and and include a quadrennial leap year, which endured for 1500 years before the Gregorian Calendar tweaked the leap year scheme for centenary years; considering that the inaccuracy of the Julian calender only amounted to 3 days over 400 years, it error factor was < 0.001%.

Ceasar may not have thought of the earth as just another planet orbiting just another sun in just another galaxy, but it's highly unlikely that he believed the earth to be flat.

Thank you.

I suck. I thought we were still talking about rot13-ing words and that I should point out that Julius Caesar could not have known what the modern English language word "earth" means and that it is the same as "terra" in Latin, i.e., a point about historical linguistics instead of astronomy and natural philosophy.

Terra and Gia are Latin and Greek for Earth.

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