Etienne Cherdlu

[Alan Westrope]

On Tue, 15 Oct 1996, George Haberberger <ghaberbe at frontiernet.net> wrote:

>At 10:29 PM 10/14/96 +0100, George James Software wrote:
>>In TPs short story there is a character called Etienne Cherdlu (a fat boy
>>keen on practical jokes).
>>Referring to this character in a recent conversation someone noticed that
>>Etienne Cherdlu was rather similar to ETAOIN SHRDLU.

>Any cryptographer worth his/her salt will tell you that the frequency of
>letters in the English language is E, then T, then A, then O, ...

Yes, though the exact frequency distribution depends on the text that's
used for the analysis, of course.  E.g., military text is terse and omits
many articles.  The American Cryptogram Association relies a lot on
frequency tables for solving many types of traditional ciphers, and
our current handbook gives the frequency distribution for English as:

etaoni rshldc upfmwy bgvkqx ja

However, ETAOIN SHRDLU seems to occupy a historical position as the
canonical order for the twelve most frequent letters.  Given Pynchon's
interest in information theory, entropy, etc., he's almost certain to
have encountered this string of text in the writings of, say, Claude
Shannon or George Kingsley Zipf.  (Zipf's writings, btw, are useful for
cryptography and cryptanalysis as well as counting words at seances.)

Here's a codetta from David Kahn's _The Codebreakers_, p. 742:
=====================================================================
Long before Morse, typefounders realized that it was to their
advantage not to case as many q's or z's as e's in a font...the
font of 12-point Bodoni Book...contains 53 lower-case e's and
only 6 z's.  Similarly, Ottmar Mergenthaler decided that the
letter matrices in his Linotype should be arranged in order of
the demand for each letter, perhaps to speed composition by
having the more frequent letters traverse a shorter distance.
This put lower-case e at the extreme left, followed by t, a, o,
and so on.  Since the key that controls each letter must be
situated under its matrices' channel, the keyboard as assembled
reflects the frequency of letters in English:

e     s     c     v     x
 t     h     m     b     z
  a     r     f     g
   o     d     w     k
    i     l     y     q
     n     u     p     j

This accounts for the 'etaoin shrdlu' sometimes seen in newspapers:
linotypists just run their fingers down the keys to fill out an
incorrect line.
=====================================================================

--
Alan Westrope     PGP public key:  http://www.crl.com/~awestrop
<awestrop at crl.com>
<awestrop at nyx.net>
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