Some words to remember:
“Why put the mop on the stairs if the cat can’t see it?”
Remembering that sort of thing should be pretty easy, after all, when it’s been part of your family sound track for more than 20 years. And that’s what might make it a good candidate for a new log-in option, known as a passphrase.
It’s an alternative to passwords. Those guardians at the gates of all our digital domains are involved in a tug of war. As people look for shortcuts, some choose a password such as, well, “password.” Or they log in with the name of a pet, which is easy to remember but not the gold standard in cyber security.
That is forcing systems to make their log-in rituals even more complex.
Passphrases can offer the best of both worlds, as the Washington Post reported a couple of weeks ago. You can use a string of words, which is good. They can appear to be chosen at random, which is even better. Hacking programs “are thrown off by length nearly as easily as randomness,” Todd C. Frankel and Andrea Peterson wrote in the Post. “To a computer, poetry or simple sentences can be just as hard to crack.”
Nonsense phrases are recommended, and one example cited in the Post is: “The spherical brown fox jumped into the Russian Bundestag.”
(You also can remove all the spaces and punctuation marks to produce one long chunk of 50 or so characters.)
But we’ve all said or heard nonsensical stuff. And best of all, that sort of phrases actually makes perfect sense to somebody who knows the story behind it — such as the four of us who once shared our home with a paranoid pet.
Our cat seemed convinced that the dust mop was out to kill her. We had no idea what the mop ever did to her; it was always on its best behavior around us. But we definitely tried to take advantage of the reaction. Our cat liked to go upstairs and hang out in our bedroom, which is something we tried to discourage.
So we set the mop on the bottom step and leaned the handle against the banister to see if it would scare the cat away. It worked fine until somebody threw a sweatshirt onto the mop and covered it, which is when I found myself asking that question about stairs and cats.
Just about every household on Earth has echoed with that sort of seemingly bizarre declaration — particularly households with pets and kids.
The parent-child relationship can be a productive source for family catchphrases. Long after our daughter headed out the door on her way to the prom, I still remember offering the same words of advice we had passed back and forth over the years: “Have a good prom … and don’t forget your duck.”
(One of Gary Larson’s “Far Side” cartoons was involved.)
Little kids are a wealth of phrases that become part of family lore. In a riff on something my son once said, I am imaging two kids in the back seat; the big sister is letting the parents know that her 3-year-old brother is starting to nod off: “Mommy, Jason’s eyes want to go home now.”
Every household has a heritage of quotes, punch lines and bizarre exclamations that make sense only to the people who heard them. So you might look for a chance to try one out as a passphrase … and don’t forget your duck.
