Lex Luthor: What is that? What are you writing about me now? Give! (Lex yanks notepad away) Unintelligible squiggles! I can mentally crack any code known to man in less than a minute. Time me...
Clark Kent: It's shorthand, Lex. Simmer down.
Clark Kent: It's shorthand, Lex. Simmer down.
A document is lost or stolen, and whoever intercepts it cannot use it (or if they do try using the information, it ends up blowing up in their face) due to certain aspects of the document itself. The thing is, these aspects were unintentional, not a conscious decision on the part of the creator.
Compare The Illegible, where a a document is unreadable because of poor handwriting.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Ranma ½: A manga chapter and anime episode are focused on Happōsai's attempt to rediscover his legendary technique (which he forgot about), the Happō-Dai-Karin, and the gang's efforts to prevent him. When the scroll sporting the secret technique is finally retrieved, nobody can read it because of Happōsai's atrocious handwriting. This include Happō himself, which frustrates him so much that he ends up tearing the scroll.
Comic Books
- All-Star Superman: While being interviewed by Clark Kent in prison, Lex Luthor becomes suspicious about what the reporter is writing and takes his notepad. After failing to understand Clark's "unintelligible squiggles", Lex brags that he can crack any code. Clark corrects him by stating it's just shorthand. A flummoxed Lex hands the pad back to Clark but mentally notes that shorthand is something new for him to learn.
Fan Fiction
- In Sometimes the Only Winning Move is not to Play
, Harry gets a copy of Salazaar Slytherin's memoirs but can't read them at all as they were written over a thousand years ago in a language Harry calls the "bastard love child of German and French".
- Great Grand-Uncle Schimmelhorn's Toolbox: Taylor explains that deciphering Schimmelhorn's journals is extremely difficult because they were written in an esoteric mix of English, German, and a large number of terms that he made up himself because the terminology to describe his discoveries didn't yet exist.
- Shadow Realm: Blasphemy has a researcher attempting to translate an ancient tablet. This proves extremely difficult for a number of reasons; among them, it's in literally a dozen languages, many of which he doesn't personally speak, and often switches languages mid-sentence, and much of it is magical formulae devised by unknown parties using unknown codes and ciphers. He manages to translate it, and ultimately wishes he hadn't.
Films — Live-Action
- In The Book of Eli, Carnegie is trying to steal the book that Eli is carrying. In this After the End setting, books are rare and Bibles even rarer, and he thinks that if he gets his hands on one, he can use it to manipulate other people. He does finally get it in the end, only to discover that it's written in Braille, and the only other person capable of reading it refuses to do so.
Literature
- Tatiana, one of the sequels to Gorky Park, has a murdered translator who kept his notebook in a highly personal form of shorthand; as a result, a significant part of the book consists of attempting to decipher the entries. One such entry reads:
Box Kite: star, bug, sunrise, triangle. Man in Top Hat No Line: question mark, crossed knives, two rings, fish under wave. Crescent Moon: arrow down, bug, ear, equals sign, black teardrop, white teardrop and RR. Star: arrow down, railroad tracks, RR, and the letter L.
- In The Westing Game, one character's notes are stolen. She puts up a want-ad requesting their return and stating that they are useless to anyone but her, because she knows this trope is in play — some of the other characters do turn out to know shorthand, but none of them also know Polish.
- In Witches Abroad, Granny Weatherwax does manage to tease a limited amount of useful information out of Desiderata Hollow's notes on Genua's political situation, but it's tough going, as it was written to remind Mistress Hollow of things she already knew and is filled with undefined abbreviations, unexplained assumptions, and, most annoyingly, foreign words.
- Isaac Asimov:
- In "The Singing Bell", Peyton studies a treasure map, and notes that any map made by an amateur helps no one but the author, who remembers the details. After a couple days, he manages to narrow it down to three possibilities.
- In the Black Widowers story "The Three Numbers", a note giving the combination to a safe as "l2r27l5" is misinterpreted because it was typed on a machine which used identical characters for the letter "l" and the digit "1", and the ambiguity never occurred to the person trying to open the safe until Henry figured it out.
- Mairelon the Magician has a variant with Henri d'Armand's spellbook. As long as he had the base version of a ritual spell in front of him, Henri could easily remember all the little tweaks he needed to make it work the way he wanted, so he never wrote those down. So when the antagonist gets his hands on the spellbook, he finds it full of spells that look like they're complete but don't actually work.
Live-Action TV
- In an episode of The Office (US), Dwight steals Michael's rolodex, which is filled with the names of several clients and color-coded personal information about them. The color-coding, however, is highly idiosyncratic; for example, green means "go right ahead and shut up about that", while orange means "orange you glad I didn't bring that up?" (in a talking-head sequence, Michael admits that most of the colors are admonitions not to mention those topics). As a result, Dwight brings up a client's gay son (which is color coded green, so to Dwight it must have seemed to mean it was OK to discuss), and as a result ends up sabotaging the sale he's attempting to make.
Tabletop Games
- This is part of how Call of Cthulhu justifies your characters needing literal weeks (sometimes dozens of them) to fully study a Tome of Eldritch Lore. These books were written centuries ago, in languages that are often dead by the modern day, and using codes and systems known only to their authors. Most of the time spent studying them is less about actually reading the text and more trying to make the text comprehensible.
Video Games
- The "The Messy Note" puzzle in Professor Layton and the Unwound Future involves making sense of a note which is obscured by the writer's horrible handwriting. It's supposed to have the number required to open a locked door on it, but it only says, "RHB=". It's actually a hastily written "121-113=", so the answer is "8".
- In Discworld Noir, Lewton finds a clue scrawled on the wall by a dying murder victim. The message's meaning is obscured for a while, until Lewton realizes that it was written just after the victim's killer had hung them upside-down, hence was written that way as well.
Web Original
- Parodied in this article from The Onion; the CIA claims that they didn't put all the black bars in redacted articles to keep control of classified information — instead they were trying to highlight it and stupidly used black highlighter markers to do it. Now all of the important information is unreadable, leaving only the redacted copies.
Western Animation
- In an episode of Doug, Doug loses his journal and is afraid that someone will read it and reveal all his embarrassing personal information. However, his handwriting is so illegible that Roger Klotz can't read any of his "chicken scratch" when he finds the journal.
- In the Spirit of this trope, In Justice League Unlimited, Lex Luthor accidentally does a "Freaky Friday" Flip with Flash and realizes he's in a unique position to unmask the Flash and learn who he is. Of course, when he does just this, Lex realizes that the person under the mask isn't famous enough for him to know and is generally unmemorable in appearance, making it moot.
Real Life
- Sadly a common problem with data preservation. Because of the rapid rate at which data storage technology progresses, it's all-too-common for files and code created decades ago to be unreadable to modern users, due to the original format becoming too outdated to be readable with today's technology (either due to the physical format no longer being popularly used, such as with floppy disks or magnetic tape, the file type not being supported by modern operating systems, or deterioration of the physical media). Oftentimes, this requires digging up old computer technology both to make the files readable and create software that can mimic the old tech on modern devices— though it's only a matter of time before the software's file format becomes unusable on current tech too.
- The BBC Domesday Project is a famous example of this; the original project was recorded on read-only multimedia LaserDisc, resulting in its obsolescence before a decade had passed.
