2022: Summer Contest

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Commencement season brought even more quotable people to campus than usual. The reason is hardly cryptic: Amherst had two ceremonies this year (on May 29, for the class of 2022, and on June 11, for the class of 2020). Double ceremonies meant awarding an especially large number of honorary degrees—eight in all.

The “cryptoquote” in the box below is a quotation, written in cipher, from one of those honorees. She is known for her poetry, plays and essays, and the quotation speaks to the power of literature.

About Cryptoquotes

A cryptoquote is a puzzle in which one letter stands for another. Take this example:

JOHNSON CHAPEL
FBXZABZ  TXSVPE

B is used for O, X for H and so forth.

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Your Challenge

Solving the four-line code below will reveal a quotation and its author. (It’s a different code than in the Johnson Chapel example above.) The length of each word and the punctuation of the sentence act as clues.

Here’s a hint: E is used for C. Here’s another: See the list of honorees at amherst.edu/go/commencement.

Send your solution to magazine@amherst.edu or mail it to Amherst magazine, Box 5000, Amherst, MA 01002. From the correct entries, we’ll randomly select one winner to receive an Amherst T-shirt of their choosing. The solution will appear in the Fall 2022 issue.

“ZLNYFK SC O CPGELICESLPC ELIMNFCOYSLI:

SY SC OC VPEU YUN TLFX LD YULCN TUL

PIANFCYOIA SY OC YULCN TUL VOXN SY.”

— CLISO COIEUNR

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Sanderson Smith ’60 challenged readers to create words out of the letters in Stearns, with no letter used more than once (except s, which can be used twice). Each word had to contain at least four letters. We excluded contractions, acronyms, proper nouns and words not in modern English. Our winner is Boruch Fishman ’71, with 76 accepted words. Here is his list. (David Lahm ’63 placed second, with 73 words.)