There’s a Sherlock Holmes story, “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” where after reviewing all the clues in the case Sherlock sat on a pillow all night long smoking, and in the morning, he knew the answer to the mystery. This was the only explanation given as to how he solved it, which I found very unsatisfying. That being said, some solutions are like that, you just figure it out and you don’t know exactly how or why.
This is actually a great talent of human beings, the ability to subconsciously pick up on subtleties, and from them form feelings, a conclusion on an emotional level. We’ve all had the experience where we say privately to our friends something like, “I just don’t trust that guy.” And we’re usually right!
Fuzzy logic is an approach to computing based on degrees of truth rather than the usual true or false. We know this concept as a hunch, intuition, or having a feeling. When we say “trust your feelings” or “go with your gut” we are embracing fuzzy logic. Fortune tellers and folks who can accurately guess your age are masters at this skill. It was a hunch, a feeling about a particular word, that allowed me to solve the secret of The Secret for Cleveland.
My big break was from a single word, the word couplet. I didn’t logically know anything. I just had a feeling about it. I just saw something in the word. Do you see it too? This is my favorite part of the whole Cleveland puzzle. It’s a masterfully hidden clue! Absolutely brilliant!
The suffix “let” refers to a diminutive form of something. For example, a small book is a booklet. Likewise, a small coup would be a couplet! It’s fascinating how the spelling of the word couplet permits a completely different interpretation. What is a small coup? Maybe a failed or partial coup? Hmmm.
This could allude to the 1881 Assacination of President James Garfield, which would explain the forced use of 81 vs 82. I thought briefly that this might be the secret of The Secret for Cleveland, but he was killed by a lone crazy gunman from a different faction of his own party, which is not really a coup, not particularly interesting, and certainly not a secret. So I tossed the idea.
The word coup fits with another word near the beginning of the poem, “plot.” A coup most certainly is a plot. But what is a “rectangular plot”? I usually think of the definition of rectangular as something that looks like a rectangle. However, I learned that this is not necessarily the case. One of the handful of definitions for the word rectangular is simply something that has right angles. Could we be looking for a politically right angled or fascist plot?
If you google “US coup,” you’ll get loads of information on all the numerous coups in which the US participated, mostly in South and Central America. You’ll find a bit about January 6, 2020. And you might find something about the only successful coup within the US, the Wilmington, North Carolina, insurrection of 1898, which was at the city level. The latter is definitely worth reading about, but doesn’t seem to fit with our other clues. After that, you’ll become mired in repetition.
However, if you google “US coup” and our unused clues—WWI (the helmet), Pennsylvania (the keystone state), Philadelphia (the Liberty Bell), and fascism—you will find, as I did, our punchline.
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