Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Hobo Signs

Episode Date: May 22, 2024

By definition hobos are people who travel from town to town taking odd jobs as they go. But some towns are friendlier than others, and hobos developed a system of symbols they left one another to know what to expect from a town.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Get emotional with me, Radhie Devlukya, in my new podcast, A Really Good Cry. We're going to be talking with some of my best friends. I didn't know we were going to go there, Amir. I know, because this is... People that I admire. When we say listen to your body, really tune in to what's going on. Authors of books that have changed my life. Now you're talking about sympathy, which is different than empathy, right?

Never forget, it's okay to cry as long as you make it a really good one. Listen to A Really Good Cry with Raleigh Devlukia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to Short Stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. What are you going to do about it, Short Stuff? Yeah, this is called Outdated Names for People Edition. I guess so. I love, so a lot of this came from the NSA, the National Security Agency,

the one that's been spying on Americans for decades now. Okay. And they basically hid behind hobos when they were talking about tramps and bums, which I assume is what you're talking about. But they're like, according to hobos, this is what this means. Yeah, yeah. These are old terms used back then. So just know we're not suggesting that anyone call an unhoused person a bum or a tramp? No, but specifically the NSA says that hobos say specifically that a hobo is a traveling itinerant worker who wants to work, who also loves to travel. And the way that they put it is a hobo travels to

work and works to travel. Frequently they're working so they can save up enough to tide them over through the winter, which they'll take off, and they'll get back on the road. They travel by train, by car, however they can. We talked about them in the hitchhiking episode, if I remember correctly. And then according to the NSA, according to hobos,

the difference between a tramp and a hobo and a bum and a hobo is that a tramp is also a traveler, but they don't like to work, they don't work. And then a bum, again, according to hobos, according to the NSA, neither travels nor works. So there you go. Thanks for putting that all on me. Well, I mean, you're the one that put this one together.

We gotta talk about it. Okay, we have to, You can't get around it. So, hobos is what we're gonna concentrate on, specifically, as you'll see in a minute here, hobo signs. But the word hobo itself, no one's really sure where that comes from. There are a bunch of ideas, as always, as to its origin. Some, you know, as usual, make more sense than others.

For real. One is H-O-E, hobo, like, you know, as usual, make more sense than others. Uh, one is, uh, H O E, ho boy. Like if you were traveling around working, you might have some farming tools like a hoe. So you might have been a hoe boy, which could have become hobo. I say that this may be not so great. Oh, you're crazy. That's my number one. Oh yeah.

Mm hmm. All right. What's what? Okay. What's your, let me hear your pick then. What's the, where'd the word hobo come from? Well, I mean, if I was picking just from this list, I would go with, because this did start after the Civil War when there were soldiers who either wanted to go home

and would hop a train or didn't want to go home and would hop a train in the other direction. But homeward bound, H-O-B-O, makes a little more sense to me. Sure. No, I would put that one at second. That's number two for you. We have to at least name check the other one real quick. Okay. So there's one that says that it was basically a shortened version of hello, boy, just a friendly greeting, and that that came to

low boy and then low bow and then hobo yeah I think that's a terrible idea as well but it's hilarious to just say those different words in progression yeah I would also say it's probably not a Latin thing in origin but there are some people who say it's from the Latin homo bonus, meaning a good man. I don't think it's that one. Yeah, I didn't. So when somebody's saying like bonus in the 90s, they were saying like good, I guess.

It never occurred to me that they were speaking Latin. Sure. I'm sure that's what was going on. So let's just set up what we're really talking about here today, Chuck. We're talking about hobo signs, as I believe you said. And so, one thing that hobos have in common is that they like to travel, they very frequently prefer solitude, and yet they have a camaraderie with one another. So, when you're traveling as you're a hobo and you're going from like town to town and you're saying like, Hey, where can I get work?

Where can I get a free meal or something like that? You've met varyingly with different kinds of attitudes. Yeah. And those attitudes are probably going to stay roughly the same over, you know, shortest spans of time, at least. So because you care about other hobos and because you don't really meet up with them very frequently, you don, shorter spans of time at least. So, because you care about other hobos and because you don't really meet up with them very frequently, you would leave a sign. And this is what became hobo signs.

There were signs that a hobo left for another hobo, basically saying like, this is a great place to get a free meal, stay away from this house because this is where the local cop lives. All sorts of really useful information. And over time, essentially a codified system developed. Fantastic.

What a great setup. Thank you. I appreciate that. All right. We'll take a break and we'll be right back to talk about what was on these signs right after this. Get emotional with me, Radhita Vlukya, in my new podcast, A Really Good Cry. We're going to talk about and go through all the things that are sometimes difficult to process alone.

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So all you have to do is listen to Marketing School every weekday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And don't try to go, try to go. Okay, so we talked about hobo signs, and we're going to start talking about that again beginning now. Yeah, like you mentioned, you know, hobos lived a very early, fairly solitary life. I guess they would hook up with friends every now and then. But the fact that you're traveling around and you're not all congregating in a big group to tell one another like, hey, this next town you're coming upon, X, Y, and Z, you should know, they would leave these signs. They were temporary by, on purpose

basically. They were like charco or charcoal because, like you said, some certain people might have certain attitudes about someone coming through town looking for work. There are changes in attitudes. Oh, no. I'm not going to do it. Thank you. RIP Jimmy Buffett.

And the person who lived in that farmhouse last year may have been super helpful and need some help, but maybe a year later they didn't. So that sign would need to be changed. So that's just sort of a clumsy way of saying, hey, let's not make these signs permanent because they need to change to convey the most recent information. Exactly. And so the signs, some of the signs that they developed just make intuitive sense. Like there's a top hat that was the sign that a wealthy person lived there. A train engine would be a good spot to mark a train.

And this one I'm kind of puzzled by because you wouldn't actually find out if it was a good spot until you were successful or not. If you were unsuccessful, you wouldn't go back and leave that sign that it was a good spot. If you were successful, you wouldn't be there anymore to leave the sign that it was a good spot. If you were successful, you wouldn't be there anymore to leave the sign that it was a good spot. I just find that a head scratcher, but more often than not.

Um, Oh, there was another one across said that if you, if you, you know, gin up some religious talk with the people who live here, they'll give you a free meal. I love that one. More often than not though, they, um, they didn't really have any intuitive connection to what they were conveying, the symbols. Matthew 16 Yeah, that cross one is really great, because at some point some hobo was not having much luck with the lady of the house, and then

they started talking about Jesus. And she was like, would you like a slice of pie? The guy's like, oh, okay, I gotcha. Jared Larson Apparently, George Washington was like that, but with horses instead of religious talk. I'm not going to believe anything you ever say anymore. So that one is true. That's a story from Gilbert Stewart, the famous

portraitist who couldn't get them to become at all, like, like to smile at all. And apparently his horse walked by and all of a sudden George Washington just opened up, started beaming and talking about his horse and horses in general. So Gilbert Stuart knew that for the rest of the sitting, he would just bring up horses and George Washington would just be up and chipper.

Yeah, he said, let me flash a smile. Let me see those pearly brown. War horse teeth. So, all right, so you mentioned a few things that made sense like the top hat and stuff like that. But there were also a lot of symbols in this code that, you know, it was sort of the symbol of the hobo that if you just look at it, it's not intuitive.

For instance, a picture of a chicken that someone has drawn, you might think, hey, this might be a place where I could get some chicken. No, no, no, that means you can use the telephone for free. Right. Box EU is a good camping spot. Some are just like, where did you get this? The sideways cross, so cross on its side, and a circle in one of the quadrants, the top quadrant,

and then the circle has three dots inside. And that means that there's a doctor that lives there and you won't charge for medical attention. Like, where would you possibly come up with that? I don't know, I tried to make sense, I'm sure you did too, of a lot of these. And I wonder if some of them did make sense to the creator or if it was just literally like,

hey, we need something. Pete Slauson Yeah. Maybe they just kept adding to it. They were like, well, this one will be a sideways cross. They're like, no, that already means there's a Satanist that lives there. Okay, well, what about a sideways cross top of the circle? That's a Satanist who loves to talk too much. Right? What about one with three dots? And they're like, okay, doctor who doesn't charge for medical advice. Jared Slauson Yeah, that's a good one. That's a real one, right?

That, yeah, that was the one I was just describing. Oh, the sideways cross, right, right, right. Okay, so there's also a circle next to a square. Each of them has a dot in the middle. And that means that the man of the house has a bad temper. Pretty clear. Steer clear. Pretty good. In other words. Yeah, a lot of these were like steer clear or go here,

but they just had like an extra little layer of information too. Yeah, the only one that made any sense was the three perpendicular diagonal lines. Oh, that made sense? Was unsafe. I just thought it might mean like three strikes is usually a bad thing.

Okay. But I don't know, that's just a guess. Okay. That made more sense in any of the rest of them, I think so The the where these signs came from is just completely lost to history Although some people are like I can tell you exactly where it came from We should probably say at this point

There are some people who who don't believe that there ever actually was a codified roughly 50 Signs that hobos used to leave to one another. There's a group called the Historical Graffiti Society that Atlas Obscura profiled some years back. And these people search for those things and they're like, I wish I would be proven wrong because I want to find them. I've never found anything like that. They think that it's possible that the whole thing was generated by early 20th century media fascination

with hobo and the hobo lifestyle. Oh, that is, I mean, I thought that reading of it was right, but they're just saying that it was just a creation of media? Yeah, so they trace it back even further to, there was a famous hobo, I can't remember his name, but he wrote a series of fantastic books that were really popular, and they think that the signs were introduced in there.

To me, that doesn't mean that the whole thing was made up. Right, right. You know, I think that possibly it wasn't nearly as codified, but they're like, we've never found a single one, and we found, like they found some in chalk that are 100 years old, but they don't bear a resemblance to this instead it's usually the first letter of whatever direction they were traveling their nickname and

then maybe the year or the date that's a genuine documented verified hobo signs hobos definitely use those a hundred plus years ago well speaking of nicknames we kind of have to mention one thing, right? Yeah. So, yeah, John Hodgman, a writer of books and podcaster of the Judge John Hodgman podcast, very famously created 800 hobo names in one of his books. And I figured we could just go through a couple of these. Do you have a list by any chance? Great idea. No, I have them all memorized.

Okay. Chili Mix Wilma Benson. That's a good one. Tommy Licecomb. Let me see. Let me do one more. How about Prostate Davey? So Hutchman came up with 800 names. That was, I've never talked to him about that. I imagine that was arduous and I'm sure he never wanted to do that again. Because I think he also had people for years saying

to create a hobo name for them and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And he'd be like, no, I'm not doing that. Yeah, fun stuff though. Just to wrap it up, there was an actual, like there was documented hobo signs that seemed to have generated organically in that it was called war chalking.

And essentially it came about in a very specific period of time, in the early 2000s, when Wi-Fi started to become ubiquitous. But free Wi-Fi was very hard to find. And so a hobo would find some place where somebody had a Wi-Fi router that didn't understand how to add a security key to it. And so there was just free Wi-Fi router that didn't understand how to add like a security key to it and so there was just free Wi-Fi. So they would leave a little mark for other hobos to say like you can get free Wi-Fi here and then as people started to get savvier and added security to their routers that kind of went

away but simultaneously free Wi-Fi zones like in some cities now are just completely wired up with free Wi-Fi Like that kind of grew in its place So the whole premise of war chalking lives in a very very small window of time. I just find that fascinating Interesting. I love it. I Love it too Chuck and I love the short stuff and the short stuff is out stuff and the short stuff is out.