In our last post in a series exploring the question, “What is (un)natural about learning to read and write?,” we looked at a paper from 1980 by Phillip Gough and Michael Hillinger, Learning to Read: An Unnatural Act, that provided a counter to Ken and Yetta Goodman’s argument that learning to read is natural, and provided us with a useful analogy: learning to read an alphabetic writing system is a form of cryptanalysis. Using this analogy, Gough and Hillinger drew out a fine-grained distinction between a code and a cipher that allowed them to make some precise observations about the difficulty of breaking the alphabetic cipher that have held up quite well over the years.