“It’s a fine day for backgammon, wouldn’t you agree?”
–and other phrases. I have no doubt that genuine secret agents talk this way all the time, yet it seems as though such classic sign/countersign shorthand isn’t used in spy films anymore, except as parody. Alas, there seems little chance that I will ever be approached by a nervous, pudgy man who will whisper to me in a vaguely Eastern European accent that his emu only has one leg. I’m sure all of us have felt that regret at one time or another.
I’m curious to learn when the whole “ostentatiously mundane phrase = hello, i’m also a spy” exchange was first used on film, or in print. How far back does it go? Does anyone know?
And… does your garden hose leak in the springtime?
The novel (1957) and subsequent film (1963) From Russia With Love contain a recognition routine along the lines of:
1: Do you have a match?
2: I use a lighter.
1: Even better.
2: Until they go wrong.
The novel talks about how this routine changes monthly. The phrasing is deliberately banal. I’d guess that weird variants were parodies from the get-go, helped along by Get Smart and whatnot.
I always got a kick out of watching the secret agents trying to pull off those banal exchanges in the old movies. They’re not nonchalant at all, they’re always so intense and serious about it, and if I was a spy following them that would be my cue to sneak up on them and jab them with my cyanide filled ballpoint pen.
I seem to recall hearing or reading something somewhere about a group of US Navajo code-talkers in WWII being overheard by Japanese soldiers, but they seemed to be talking about their breakfast of bacon and eggs. But my unreliable memory is probably horribly mangling this bit of apocrypha.
I mean, the monkey likes his bananas tart and green.
I know that much (the Navajo language bit, not the cat having fleas bit, and by the way, the scarecrow’s pants are torn), but it was some unusual thing I heard someplace… I have no idea anymore. Perhaps someone mistook the sound of Navajo words for English (or Japanese) words. But I’m also fishing in a memory more than a decade old, and considering that a decade ago, I was 8…
Living in Arizona, I heard a lot about the code talkers even from a young age. It’s local history and therefore considered important. But I have since forgotten most of the purely anecdotal bits of information I accumulated then.
I’d guess in real life the recognition signs were much more realistic, like the one Bryan quoted above. I don’t think any spy has ever said anything like “The yellow owl hoots at dawn.” You might as well tatoo “I am a spy” on your forehead.
Not almost – nobody, period. No one ever came close to breaking the Navajo code; there was a contest after the war in which I think a couple of branches participated, and they tried to break it. After half an hour, the Navajo team had finished deciphering the message, and everyone else was still frantically trying to transcribe some part of it.
Several of my friends and I have an agreement. The phrase “the mayonnaise is really good here” means “Help. Get me the hell of here NOW.” Wherever “here” may be.
> I seem to recall hearing or reading something somewhere about a group of US
> Navajo code-talkers in WWII being overheard by Japanese soldiers, but they
> seemed to be talking about their breakfast of bacon and eggs. But my
> unreliable memory is probably horribly mangling this bit of apocrypha.
If someone who didn’t know Navajo overheard one of the code talkers speaking, they wouldn’t be able to understand anything they said. It would just be gibberish. The military authorities who started the Navajo code talkers project did so precisely because they were fairly certainly that almost no one in Japan knew Navajo. Even if a Navajo speaker had listened to the code talkers’ messages, they wouldn’t have been able to break them. They would have sounded like a random list of Navajo words.
Navajo code talk was a code using the Navajo language. Several hundred military terms and other common words (in English) were assigned somewhat arbitrary Navajo words to serve as codes for those words. Other words were spelled out (using the English word). Each English letter was assigned a Navajo word. Even if the Japanese had some Navajo translators, it would have taken a fair bit of code breaking skill to work out the code.
