Cracking the Cecil Adams enigma code

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

We’ve all heard of the Cecil Adams legend.

Some believe the name to be the pseudonym of a real person, a man of almost superhuman mind powers who has dedicated himself to fighting ignorants wherever he may find them for over forty years now. Others think he’s just a myth, a figment of our collective imagination, like the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot or Mothman.

It just so happens that I have recently come by a sophisticated software application that is able to analyze the letters of any given word, rearrange the relative positions of each letter and then extrapolate new words from those letters.

I am of the belief that the name “Cecil Adams” is itself a cryptograph - a coded message that contains, encrypted within it, the hallowed secret of Cecil Adams’ true identity.

I have been running the name CECIL ADAMS through the encryption software’s complex algorithms on a programmable computing machine. In addition to many other words, there is one set of words that I am convinced holds the key to unriddling the enigma:

I AM ED SACCL

I do believe there to be an additional level of encryption with the surname which uses a cipher that, unfortunately, I have not yet been able to crack.

All we can say with absolute certainty is that Cecil Adams’ first name is Ed and that his surname has five letters, two of which are the same letter.

I shall continue with my endeavors to crack the cipher…

2

If any thread needed a “Jeremiah Johnson”-style, Merle Haggard ballad, it’s this one.

3

Can your algorithm look back in time to 1973-1978 and discover that CECIL ADAMS also spells out I AM DAVE and I AM MIKE, since Cecil showed up five years before Ed?

4

OOOH! This is way before my time.
Dave? Mike? Cecil?
It should make for an interesting story, just don’t jeopardize his columns.

5

Edward Albee?

6

I believe Cecil is basically non-violent, and would never stoop to fighting ignorants.

7

You don’t want to go down this rabbit hole

8

Mike Lenehan and Dave Kehr were The Straight Dope’s (and thus Cecil’s) editors during the first five years of the column. As noted, Ed Zotti didn’t arrive on the scene until 1978.

Or did he?:confused: Could Ed have been there all along, a spectral presence perhaps? Or could Cecil, alarmed by his rapidly growing fame and world-wide attention, decide after five years that he needed a mild-mannered alter ego, so he could walk amongst the commoners unmolested, and actually create a software application similar to the OP’s that reverse-engineered his name?