I like word puzzles. From an early age I enjoyed crosswords and codes, in college I began unscrambling letters and solving acrostics and diagramless varieties, and I have engaged, chronically I see, at backwards reading and mirror writing. I have developed a facility for recognizing odd or recurring combinations of letters.

Three words I want to appreciate today are idea, that, and people. There are many others (like always and enemy, every and understand), but I have a word limit.

Idea is not the only four-letter word that starts with i and ends with a (iota), but it’s the one you’ll find most often in quotes. In fact, it’s the most commonly occurring a-ending four letter word I’ve encountered.

That starts and ends with the same letter and is similar to the. So it’s often the key to a quote in substitution code. Look for it.

And people? People talk about people all the time. The word crops up in many puzzles. See its p and e recurrence? That’s rare (similar to George).

The word idea came to us from Greek via Latin. It originally meant “a form, the appearance of a thing as opposed to its reality,” and it’s from the verb idein (to see).

People seems to have acquired its spelling while in Middle English and Old French mouths (peple, puple, pople, pueple). It was Latin populus and my old dictionary asserts it began as the Latin plebs (commonfolk) and the Greek polys (many).