Tue 12 May 2020
Stories I’m Reading: ISAAC ASIMOV “All in the Way You Read It.â€
Posted by Steve under Stories I'm Reading[5] Comments
ISAAC ASIMOV “All in the Way You Read It.†Black Widowers #13. Short story. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September 1974. Collected in More Tales of the Black Widowers (Doubleday, hardcover, 1976) and in The Best Mysteries of Isaac Asimov (Doubleday, hardcover, 1986) as “The Three Numbers.â€
The Black Widowers were a dinner club of six members based in Manhattan who met once a month for a meal and discussion, invariably centered about the solution to a puzzle presented to them by a guest brought by one of the members. The pre-dinner discussion in “All in the Way You Read It†is about the strangeness of the English language; the problem to be tackled always comes after dinner.
To illustrate the former first, consider the word “unionized.†A labor leader might reasonably read this as “union-ized,†while a physicist might see it as “un-ionized.†And just for fun, here’s another: what common word in the English language changes its pronunciation when its first letter is changed to a capital letter?
The answer comes into play when after the evening meal, that night’s guest brings up the question he has brought. He is trying to open a safe for which he has copied the combination on a piece of paper. He has written it by hand, and it looks like this:
I’m not sure if this one’s easy, or it’s a stumper, but with all of the misdirection provided, I didn’t get it. Either way, one of the amusements of these stories, and Asimov wrote quite a few of them, is that it is invariably Henry, the waiter that serves them, who comes up with the solution. Which he does in this one, too. Nothing noir or hard-boiled about this one!
May 12th, 2020 at 9:57 pm
The obvious answer of Left 12 Right 27 Left 15 is not it.
May 13th, 2020 at 8:05 pm
Was there a special reason there was only one try possible or the questioner didn’t try the fairly obvious when L 12 R 27 L 15 failed?
May 13th, 2020 at 8:10 pm
I see I didn’t make that clear. The person with the “combination” tried all kinds of ways to interpret it, including the obvious one, and none of the ones he tried worked.
May 13th, 2020 at 8:12 pm
Here is a possible hint. The two words that are pronounced differently when the first letter is capitalized are “polish” and “Polish.”
May 14th, 2020 at 9:14 pm
I feel better that I didn’t figure it out, now that no one else has, but I’m not off the hook, since I had the advantage of a lot more context.
But here’s the answer:
Left 2 Right 27 Left 5