Letter Games and Net Culture
| abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz NOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKLM |
|
| aha ↔ nun | ant ↔ nag |
| balk ↔ onyx | bar ↔ one |
| barf ↔ ones | be ↔ or |
| bin ↔ ova | ebbs ↔ roof |
| envy ↔ rail | er ↔ re |
| errs ↔ reef | flap ↔ sync |
| fur ↔ she | gel ↔ try |
| gnat ↔ tang | irk ↔ vex |
| clerk ↔ pyrex | purely ↔ cheryl |
| PNG ↔ cat | SHA ↔ fun |
| furby ↔ sheol | terra ↔ green |
| what ↔ Jung | URL ↔ hey |
| purpura ↔ Chechen | shone ↔ FUBAR |
| Ares ↔ Nerf | abjurer ↔ nowhere |
ROT13 provides an opportunity for letter games. Some words will, when transformed with ROT13, produce another word. The longest example in the English language is the pair of 7-letter words abjurer and nowhere; there is also the 7-letter pair Chechen and purpura. Other examples of words like these are shown in the table. The pair gnat and tang are an interesting example which are both ROT13 reciprocals and palindromes.
The 1989 International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) included an entry by Brian Westley. Westley's computer program can be encoded in ROT13 or reversed and still compiles correctly. Its operation, when executed, is either to perform ROT13 encoding on, or to reverse its input.
The newsgroup alt.folklore.urban coined a word—furrfu—that was the ROT13 encoding of the frequently encoded utterance "sheesh". "Furrfu" evolved in mid-1992 as a response to postings repeating urban myths on alt.folklore.urban, after some posters complained that "Sheesh!" as a response to newcomers was being overused.
Read more about this topic: ROT13
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