There is a lot of sloppy journalism out there. Obvious questions not asked, basic facts not gotten straight, numbers literally not adding up, tens to thousands of orders of magnitude errors. The perennial sensationalist phrasing and populist use of emotion laden words as supposedly neutral wording. And then there is ignorance of basic knowledge becoming a lens through which things become overly mysterious.

The Guardian writes (archive link) about a new Stephen Hawking biography, in which for the first time also the diaries of his father, and letters and journals from his mother were available as source. The article contains an image of his father’s diary entries for early January 1963. The image caption reads:

"Extract from diaries kept by Stephen Hawking’s father, who wrote many entries using a secret code that the biographer Graham Farmelo has cracked."

Secret code? Ooh, mysterious and intriguing! And the biographer cracked it! Roll over, Bletchley Park!
Let’s see if I can ‘crack’ it too.

Extract of a diary page by Frank Hawking of 3 January 1963, taken from the full page published by The Guardian in the link above.

Actually it’s easy. The snippet above is from Thursday 3 January 1963 and reads

St(ephen) wants a tape recorder for his 21st. They seem to be expensive (35GBP) and not very useful but as things are I would refuse him nothing. Later I went into London

Hawking’s 21st was a week later, was already ill, and soon after his diagnosis was that he would not live for more than 2 years (this is the ‘as things are’), and hence the ‘refuse him nothing’.

The code is no code of course, it is Greek script, used to transliterate regular English. Anyone could spot that it is Greek script, and anyone who had a year of ancient Greek at school knows how to do this. Pretending it is code to crack just tells me you’ve never bothered to register that there are other scripts and what they look like.

Writing your diaries this way is an easy way to increase the likelihood that someone finding it will not immediately be able to easily read it. It’s a small instrument to maintain some privacy and shield the people you name. Or to feel a little bit more protected so as to not self censor. So that for instance the first line of the day’s entry, which precedes the one above "This morning at five AM we made love. Later I went to Mill Yard (?) in Hobbe’s car." felt safe to write.

The article further down actually quotes Hawking senior, explaining it is Greek script used this way. So then the caption is perhaps not ignorance but only sensationalist. Still. A main Dutch news site repeated the Guardian while removing context, and at the same time promoting the image caption that Hawking senior wrote in code and the author had cracked it to a full paragraph at the end, so the ignorance propagates because its sensationalist implication is sticky.

I used transliteration myself this same way a lot in my twenties, and still do regularly. Whenever I am writing something private in public on paper I use Greek script (although I’m sure E and Y would tell you my handwriting is bad enough to serve as privacy shield all by itself). In primary school I taught myself cyrilic and used that, but that doesn’t map all that well onto Latin script, so many varieties of s related sounds in cyrillic. (I also tried to learn stenography on my own in primary school but couldn’t get to grips with it). Greek script, which I was taught in secondary school, maps much better, except it doesn’t have a v or w (Hawking sr. writes the w unchanged, and replaces the v with a reclining F as is common, which I use for the w actually as I write the v as I would an f, using φ) nor an h (which is solved by a diacritic sign on the next vowel that ancient Greek already uses.). I also have Greek and cyrillic enabled on my laptop’s keyboard, both because I need it sometimes, if rarely, for work purposes, and because sometimes I use them to make private notes on my laptop too when I am in public.

Not secret but private. No ‘code’, no ‘cracking’ other than learning to read someone’s handwriting, just transliteration.

The caption should have been "Extract from diaries kept by Stephen Hawking’s father, who wrote many entries using a secret code using transliterated Greek script, that the biographer Graham Farmelo has cracked could easily read after getting used to Hawking’s handwriting.