Brought to book

I was, I concede it, foxed. And gallingly, the mystery which perplexed me concerns The Da Vinci Code, a book I've never read and a film I've never seen.

Here is the enigma, quoted from a report on the discovery of a secret code hidden in a high court ruling that Brown's book had not been plagiarised from an earlier "non-fiction" work.

After the "Smithy Code" series, there are an additional 25 jumbled letters contained on the first 14 pages of the document, Tench said, adding he thinks the series can be decoded using an anagram or an alphabet-inspired, code-breaking device. Known as a codex, the system is also found in Brown's "The Da Vinci Code."

But isn't a codex just a technical word for a bound book as opposed to a scroll or manuscript? I asked myself. Surely, I thought, it has nothing to do with codes. Wrong again, as we'll see. The report, meanwhile, goes on to define its terms:

A codex uses the letters of the alphabet and matches them with an additional set of letters placed in a different order, dubbed a substitution cipher. It is derived from a scene in the novel where Harvard professor Robert Langdon and French cryptographer Sophie Neveu use the code to try to unravel the location of the Holy Grail, using a famed device invented by Leonardo Da Vinci for transporting secret messages.

I turn to Collins, for brevity: "Codex 1. a volume, in book form, of manuscripts of an ancient text 2. Obsolete a legal code." Nothing about codes in the sense of ciphers, only codes in the sense of sets of rules.

So it's off to the OED, where I find that code and codex do indeed have a common ancestor; the Latin word codex, which meant tree trunk, then wooden block, then book. The normal Latin word for book was liber - librum, but this word did not always suggest the format of the book; a single librum might appear on several scrolls, or several might appear together in one codex. The word codex came particularly to be associated with legal books, especially the Codex Theodosianus, a set of laws pronounced and set down by the emperor Theodosius. You might translate that as Theodosius' book, but you might equally translate it as "Theodosius' legal code"; you may be beginning to see what happens next.

Indeed, the first English uses of "code" are references from the fourteenth century specifically to Roman and Byzantine legal documents. Later the word was extended to mean "a given country's set of laws". But there was still no relation to ciphers or cryptic messages.

Then, in 1804, the word got a new lease of life when Napoleon Bonaparte, Corsican artillery officer and self-crowned Emperor of the French, pronounced his Code Napoléon, a new set of laws for his empire. The word's range of meanings in English starts to spread noticeably after this date. By 1809, the OED records code being used to mean any set of rules. But a year earlier, one of Wellington's dispatches speaks of "a code of signals for the army" - that is, a set of rules about how to use signals (presumably to avoid interception).

The Iron Duke would, one imagines, have been gruffly proud to be the first recorded Englishman (or Irishman) to use the word code in its most common modern meaning. He might have been slightly less impressed to think that his innovation was partly inspired by old Boney.

I still don't think a codex is an "alphabet-inspired, code-breaking device", but I'm nonetheless going to see the film, whatever the critics say. But will it be as entertaining as rooting about in the OED?