The Wit’s Guide to Passwords

Or, loser names

You wouldn’t want to enter any room that would let you into it, right?

When’s the last time you used a real password? Not a hard-to-guess combination of letters, numbers, your mother’s maiden name, plus a special character in your mother’s family, like Uncle Charlie. I’m talking about the original meaning of passwords, the phrases you need to whisper to gain access to a secret room. Where did all the secret rooms go? For obvious reasons, I can’t tell you.

“Wouldn’t it be easier if we just named all the cats Password?”
— Sigrid Nunez

Without speakeasies, passwords are horrible and perhaps almost obsolete. The passkey revolution is upon us, you see. And what’s a passkey? I just read this whole article about them and couldn’t tell you. And that’s why they’re so safe: Zero chance I will hack your account.

“I would imagine that if you could understand Morse Code, a tap dancer would drive you crazy.”
— Mitch Hedberg

Happily my extensive review of humorous quotations has uncovered the perfect password, which I will share with you at the end of this article. Because if I share it here, everyone will know what it is. But by burying it under a few Chesterton lines, it’s basically invisible.

“An aristocracy is a secret society; and this is especially so when, as in the modern world, it is practically a plutocracy. The one idea of a secret society is to change the password.”
— G.K. Chesterton

It’s been reported that, at the time of the Louvre heist last year, the password to the museum’s video surveillance system was “Louvre.” It has yet to be confirmed that this password was chosen by their sandal-wearing head of security, Philippe Fillope.

“Through 20 years of effort, we’ve successfully trained everyone to use passwords that are hard for humans to remember but easy for computers to guess.”
— Randall Munroe

If you’ve spent your whole life typing random strings of highly memorable characters into little grey boxes, you must be really good at it, right? Of course not. This annual study of the passwords most commonly found in large data breaches found that Generation Z and the Silent Generation both favoured 12345. The more sophisticated and security-aware Gen Xers, Millennials, and Baby Boomers picked 123456. No points for guessing which demographic had “skibidi” in their top ten.

“Every password was swordfish. Whenever anyone tried to think of a word that no one would ever guess, they always chose swordfish. It was just one of those strange quirks of the human mind. ”
— Terry Pratchett

But you know what no one picked? Swordfish! This despite a whole TVTropes article titled “The Password is Always Swordfish.” The tradition dates back to a routine in Horse Feathers, the Marx Brothers movie that’s not quite as tasty as Duck Soup. If you show up with a sword and a fish, as Harpo does, they’ll let you in. And that’s how we discovered two-factor authentication.

---

“Many years ago a very wise man named Bernard Baruch took me aside and put his arm around my shoulder.
‘Harpo, my boy,’ he said, ‘I’m going to give you three pieces of advice, three things you should always remember.’
My heart jumped and I glowed with expectation. I was going to hear the magic password to a rich, full life from the master himself.
‘Yes, sir?’ I said. And he told me three things.
I regret that I’ve forgotten what they were.”
— Harpo Marx

Harpo is an anagram for Oprah, and if you rearrange the letters of The Oprah Winfrey Show, you get “Oh wow, fine hyper trash.” The English language contains so much truth, assuming we remember the correct order of the letters. And next week?

---

Each month my paid subscribers and I share some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. This is what’s at the end of the rabbit hole!

And did you know we’re in the middle of the McGuaneissance? The literary outdoorsman Thomas McGuane is suddenly being re-appreciated with big profiles in The Atlantic (gift link!) and The Believer (I read ’em all), but TBH his Wikipedia is hard to top with lines like this:

“In 1973, he crashed his Porsche on an icy Texas highway. While not seriously injured, he was left speechless for several days.”

And this:

“He entered a period where he became known as ‘Captain Berserko’...”

And also this:

“The early 1970s included an affair with actress Elizabeth Ashley, divorce from first wife Becky (who went on to marry Peter Fonda), marriage to actress Margot Kidder, the birth of their daughter, Maggie, and his second divorce—all in less than a year.”

What a year! I’ll serve up some choice cuts from McGuane’s 92 in the Shade in the next Get Wit Picks! It’s like Hunter S. Thompson after a month at the Betty Ford Center.

I used a common hacking technique to write Get Wit Quick No. 360, the same one I’ve deployed for the 359 issues that preceded it: The dictionary attack, wherein I try every single word until I find one that works. And if that doesn’t work, I brute force it by punching the keyboard. Bust the process! This newsletter’s mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Tap the ❤️ below to enter the speakeasy that is the upper echelon of my readership.