6 ms·

"Zodiac regularly and almost certainly intentionally misspelled 'paradise'...he correctly spelled more complex words and paraphrased operas like 'The Mikado' wi

"Zodiac regularly and almost certainly intentionally misspelled 'paradise'...he correctly spelled more complex words and paraphrased operas like 'The Mikado' with ease. The trope of 'slaves in paradise' is also a common one for Zodiac."

IAmGraydon 6y ago
This instantly stood out to me as well. He intentionally misspelled “paradise” because he wanted to call special attention to that word. I think there is further decoding to be done here.
- hhjj 6y ago
  I'd say paradice is Las Vegas. And he wanted to move there ? Also maybe the sentences order is a lot more garbled than the "death is life" part.
  - edoceo 6y ago
    The "Las Vegas Strip" is in Paradise, NV https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise,_Nevada https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise,_Nevada
- meowface 6y ago
  He does consistently misspell it as "paradice" across multiple letters, but why is it necessarily intentional? Two potential explanations for the consistency are that he intended to call attention to it, or that he simply thought or assumed the word was spelled that way. It's a reasonable phonetic spelling, using an existing English word ("dice"). He has a lot of other phonetic misspellings like "victoms", "darck", "epasode", "pencel", "paterned", "cruse", "coupples", "untill", "allready", "dissapeared", "rubed", "positivily", "ventalate", "silowets", "choaked", "extreamly", "posibly", "twich", "comitt", "descise", "saterical", "comidy", "butons", "considerbly", "promiced", "shure", "inthusiastic", "phraises", "nucenses", "truley", and mistakes like "to many" and "loose" for "lose". It's possible there's a meaning to it, but I suspect the most boring explanation is the most likely one, there. He may have spent a lot more time speaking than reading/writing and perhaps might not have finished high school, or maybe just happens to not have been very good at memorizing spellings. His misspellings sound a lot like phonetic misspellings I still regularly see online today, and like how people tended to write English more phonetically and less consistently a few centuries ago. We take it for granted, but English really is not at all an intuitive language when determining spelling from pronunciation or vice versa, compared to more consistent languages like German. He does seem to have an interesting affinity for using the letter "c" almost any time a soft "c" or hard "c" could be called for, and sometimes eliding other letters. Like "twich", "darck", "promiced", and "paradice". I wonder if an automated analysis of basically every piece of writing you can find from around that time and area, taking some of those patterns into account, could uncover something. Like every single physical letter written to every newspaper about anything. It'd probably require way too much manual digitization labor to be feasible, though.
  - asveikau 6y ago
    Whenever I've read material from the '60s or '70s, I've often noticed that phonetic misspellings were much more common in print in that time period than they are today. I always thought this was because it was much more tedious to check spelling before word processing software became common. Typos on internet forums notwithstanding, I might even guess the age of auto-correct, spell check, and, even things like how some OSs put squiggles over misspelled words in every text field (I think Mac was the first place I noticed this -- though I'm running firefox on FreeBSD and it's doing that in this edit field right now ...), has made the average literate person a better speller than that era. We get so much realtime feedback on spelling when writing on our devices, these opportunities to learn to spell, notice and correct our mistakes would not have at all been so accessible in 1969.
    - meowface 6y ago
      Definitely. There's also probably a bit of selection bias when seeing what HN users think of it; a high percentage of users likely have (at least) decent writing skills and probably read things fairly often (even if it's just blog posts/emails/chats). If you read/write very rarely and speak very often, these kinds of misspellings may seem pretty natural. But if you write a lot - perhaps even a lot more than you speak - they may stick out like a sore thumb and your brain might flag them as highly unnatural and a potential sign of hidden meaning. (I'm probably like 99.5% writing 0.5% speaking, myself, and I bet many people reading this are, too.) Then combine it with one of the most mysterious and analyzed crime stories in US history, with a cryptic, megalomaniacal serial killer who loved to use ciphers and symbology to toy with the press, public, and police. I can definitely see why people might suspect something deeper to the spelling, but the null hypothesis always needs to be carefully considered, first. And a side note: does anyone know what the trends over the decades are like for less "hodgepodge-y" languages, like Spanish and German? They seem to have rules for pronouncing based on spelling and spelling based on pronunciation that are a lot more predictable and consistent than English's. I would guess that the popularization of spellcheck/autocorrect might be less significant for such languages, though I'd also love to be proven wrong.
      - 6y ago
- riccia 6y ago
  Someone on an earlier Reddit forum pointed out there's a paratrooper division known as the Paradice at one time (https://old.506infantry.org/hiswwiiarticle02.html https://old.506infantry.org/hiswwiiarticle02.html). Others pointed out the term has been adopted by any other number of groups, and one person suggested a cipher supposedly with the killer's last name is Paradice backwards. My guess is the misspelling is meaningful too but it's hard to say how.
  - nostromo 6y ago
    The theory is that when passed through morse code and reversed... . -.-. .. -.. .- .-. .- .--. = ECIDARAP can be rearranged to .- .-.. .-.. . -. -.. -.-- . = ALLEN (DYE) Since the primary suspect was Arthur Leigh Allen, some thought that the mis-spelling of "paradice" might have been his "signature." I have no idea of this could be true or is a stretch.
    - oedoedxef 6y ago
      That is extremely interesting. If the FBI is correct that Allen is not the correct suspect, then it's a very strange (though not computationally rare) coincidence.
meowface 6y ago
>and paraphrased operas like 'The Mikado' with ease. He seems to have misspelled a lot of things in his charming "parody" version of it: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Zodiac_Killer_letter,_July_26th_1970 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Zodiac_Killer_letter,_July_26... He also easily could've had a recording or lyrics transcript at hand while writing it, perhaps from a library. Or even if he recounted the structure from memory, he could've just seen the play a lot, or at most he might just have pretty good musical memory. It doesn't necessarily indicate he's especially intelligent or that his rampant misspellings and incorrect grammar are deliberately planted and contain hidden meaning.

IAmGraydon 6y ago

This instantly stood out to me as well. He intentionally misspelled “paradise” because he wanted to call special attention to that word. I think there is further decoding to be done here.

hhjj 6y ago
I'd say paradice is Las Vegas. And he wanted to move there ? Also maybe the sentences order is a lot more garbled than the "death is life" part.
- edoceo 6y ago
  The "Las Vegas Strip" is in Paradise, NV https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise,_Nevada https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise,_Nevada
meowface 6y ago
He does consistently misspell it as "paradice" across multiple letters, but why is it necessarily intentional? Two potential explanations for the consistency are that he intended to call attention to it, or that he simply thought or assumed the word was spelled that way. It's a reasonable phonetic spelling, using an existing English word ("dice"). He has a lot of other phonetic misspellings like "victoms", "darck", "epasode", "pencel", "paterned", "cruse", "coupples", "untill", "allready", "dissapeared", "rubed", "positivily", "ventalate", "silowets", "choaked", "extreamly", "posibly", "twich", "comitt", "descise", "saterical", "comidy", "butons", "considerbly", "promiced", "shure", "inthusiastic", "phraises", "nucenses", "truley", and mistakes like "to many" and "loose" for "lose". It's possible there's a meaning to it, but I suspect the most boring explanation is the most likely one, there. He may have spent a lot more time speaking than reading/writing and perhaps might not have finished high school, or maybe just happens to not have been very good at memorizing spellings. His misspellings sound a lot like phonetic misspellings I still regularly see online today, and like how people tended to write English more phonetically and less consistently a few centuries ago. We take it for granted, but English really is not at all an intuitive language when determining spelling from pronunciation or vice versa, compared to more consistent languages like German. He does seem to have an interesting affinity for using the letter "c" almost any time a soft "c" or hard "c" could be called for, and sometimes eliding other letters. Like "twich", "darck", "promiced", and "paradice". I wonder if an automated analysis of basically every piece of writing you can find from around that time and area, taking some of those patterns into account, could uncover something. Like every single physical letter written to every newspaper about anything. It'd probably require way too much manual digitization labor to be feasible, though.
- asveikau 6y ago
  Whenever I've read material from the '60s or '70s, I've often noticed that phonetic misspellings were much more common in print in that time period than they are today. I always thought this was because it was much more tedious to check spelling before word processing software became common. Typos on internet forums notwithstanding, I might even guess the age of auto-correct, spell check, and, even things like how some OSs put squiggles over misspelled words in every text field (I think Mac was the first place I noticed this -- though I'm running firefox on FreeBSD and it's doing that in this edit field right now ...), has made the average literate person a better speller than that era. We get so much realtime feedback on spelling when writing on our devices, these opportunities to learn to spell, notice and correct our mistakes would not have at all been so accessible in 1969.
  - meowface 6y ago
    Definitely. There's also probably a bit of selection bias when seeing what HN users think of it; a high percentage of users likely have (at least) decent writing skills and probably read things fairly often (even if it's just blog posts/emails/chats). If you read/write very rarely and speak very often, these kinds of misspellings may seem pretty natural. But if you write a lot - perhaps even a lot more than you speak - they may stick out like a sore thumb and your brain might flag them as highly unnatural and a potential sign of hidden meaning. (I'm probably like 99.5% writing 0.5% speaking, myself, and I bet many people reading this are, too.) Then combine it with one of the most mysterious and analyzed crime stories in US history, with a cryptic, megalomaniacal serial killer who loved to use ciphers and symbology to toy with the press, public, and police. I can definitely see why people might suspect something deeper to the spelling, but the null hypothesis always needs to be carefully considered, first. And a side note: does anyone know what the trends over the decades are like for less "hodgepodge-y" languages, like Spanish and German? They seem to have rules for pronouncing based on spelling and spelling based on pronunciation that are a lot more predictable and consistent than English's. I would guess that the popularization of spellcheck/autocorrect might be less significant for such languages, though I'd also love to be proven wrong.
    - 6y ago
riccia 6y ago
Someone on an earlier Reddit forum pointed out there's a paratrooper division known as the Paradice at one time (https://old.506infantry.org/hiswwiiarticle02.html https://old.506infantry.org/hiswwiiarticle02.html). Others pointed out the term has been adopted by any other number of groups, and one person suggested a cipher supposedly with the killer's last name is Paradice backwards. My guess is the misspelling is meaningful too but it's hard to say how.
- nostromo 6y ago
  The theory is that when passed through morse code and reversed... . -.-. .. -.. .- .-. .- .--. = ECIDARAP can be rearranged to .- .-.. .-.. . -. -.. -.-- . = ALLEN (DYE) Since the primary suspect was Arthur Leigh Allen, some thought that the mis-spelling of "paradice" might have been his "signature." I have no idea of this could be true or is a stretch.
  - oedoedxef 6y ago
    That is extremely interesting. If the FBI is correct that Allen is not the correct suspect, then it's a very strange (though not computationally rare) coincidence.

meowface 6y ago

>and paraphrased operas like 'The Mikado' with ease. He seems to have misspelled a lot of things in his charming "parody" version of it: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Zodiac_Killer_letter,_July_26th_1970 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Zodiac_Killer_letter,_July_26... He also easily could've had a recording or lyrics transcript at hand while writing it, perhaps from a library. Or even if he recounted the structure from memory, he could've just seen the play a lot, or at most he might just have pretty good musical memory. It doesn't necessarily indicate he's especially intelligent or that his rampant misspellings and incorrect grammar are deliberately planted and contain hidden meaning.