EXCAVATION

[chalkoutline]

I have often wondered about the use of the word EXCAVATION since the DOI has no words starting with X. This morning i asked Google AI a few questions about EXCAVATION and here are the results...

The use of the word "excavation" became commonplace in America during the mid-to-late 19th century and early 20th century.

During the era from 1700s to 1820, the word was relatively rare. When Americans needed to describe moving earth, they typically used simpler Germanic words like "digging," "ditching," or "hollowing out".

Since TB was well educated, i asked if well educated men used thevword EXCAVATION...

No historic language data suggests that exactly "1 in 100" educated men used the word "excavation" regularly.

Based on this information, It appears to me TB did not write the message in Cipher 2. It had to be written much later.

 

[souce19]

The appearance of the letter x is very interesting. At this point it’s almost a certainty James B Ward wrote the letters and may have had a hand in the engineered cipher 2 solve. It still doesn’t mean that the ciphers and the stated contents aren’t real, but the story within the letters itself may be a retrospective tale. Not something James B Ward had first hand knowledge of but maybe it’s his take on a story he was familiar with.