14 Secret Code Words You’re Not Meant to Know Claire Nowak Updated: May. First Lady Nancy was only ever called Mrs. Reagan. Get exclusive deals, product news, reviews, and more with the Mental Floss Smart Shopping newsletter.

Still, the names themselves have never really been kept a secret.

The tradition of Secret Service code names goes back to at least the Truman administration, when the large protection detail was permanently established for the president, his family, the president elect, and the vice president (though the agency itself has been around for more than 150 years). There aren’t any 10-foot strawberries to dip in it, unfortunately. Former Secret Service agent Joseph Petro wrote, "Within a few days someone realized [that] wasn't such a good name, because in a broken transmission all you might hear was the word 'shooting,' and that could inadvertently set off a chain reaction and an awful lot of problems." 27, 2020 These phrases are meant to sound like random letters and … Cruise ships may also use this code to alert everyone on board of high winds. However, his wife Happy's had to be changed once agents noticed how problematic calling someone "Shooting Star" could be. 0xbad22222 – used by iOS crash logging to indicate that a VoIP app has been killed by iOS because it misbehaved. 0xDEADD00D – used by Android to indicate a VM abort. Wilson's camp was concerned that the public wouldn't take well to his being in a new relationship so soon, and his protection took to referring to Edith by the decidedly unsexy code name "Grandma. When airport security issues a Code Bravo, that means there’s a bomb threat or other security breach. The code 7700 is a general emergency signal for aircraft. While he was in Congress, he famously had a replica T. rex skull on display in his office.

Most programming languages use a 32-bit integer type to represent certain types of data behind the scenes — internally the number is stored in RAM or used by the CPU as 32 ones and zeros, but in the source code it would be written out in either regular decimal format, or as hexadecimal format, which uses the numbers 0 through 9 and the letters A through F. When the operating system or an application wants to determine the type of a file, it can look to the beginning of the file for a special marker that signifies the type of the file.

Hospitals can use it to signal a serious threat or mass casualties. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and his wife, Happy Rockefeller, circa 1963.

Now you won’t have to wait until Black Friday for the deal you need. He was often referred to as the "Lion of the Senate," but during his presidential campaign for the 1980 election, the youngest of the Irish-Catholic Kennedy brood was code-named "Sunburn." Along the way, you might find out a trade secret or two from one of the world’s best chocolate makers. Prince Charles talking to President Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy at a private dinner in the White House in 1981. We can only hope they get paid overtime for that. And when a programmer wants to have a little fun, they might define these values using hexadecimal numbers that spell out something in English, otherwise known as hexspeak. You can see more examples by opening up a hex editor and then opening up any number of file types.

Because, per Secret Service rules, immediate family members need code names that begin with the same first letter, Meghan wound up with "Peter Sellers."