The Secret Language of Vagabonds and Traveling Hobos

Posted by Mike Richard
Filed under: Language, Odds + Ends, Sidelines

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Traveling Hobo Signs

Not surprisingly, vagabonds and traveling hobos have their own system of language which I’m sure dates back decades, if not centuries.

Some hobos now communicate via cellular phones and e-mail. But the classic American hobo of early this century communicated through a much more basic system of marks–a code through which they gave information and warnings to their fellow Knights of the Road. Usually, these signs would be written in chalk or coal on a trestle, fence, building or sidewalk, letting others know what they could expect in the area of the symbol.

Check out the list of Hobo Signs & Symbols which seems a rather apropos addendum to the photo essay I mentioned a while back on The Underground World of Real Life Vagabonds.

My favorites: “Man with a gun lives here.” and “Kind woman lives here. Tell a pitiful story.”

How many symbols can you guess? Most are not really intuitive at all, but I suppose that’s the point.

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Vagabondish editor, Mike Richard, lives in Rhode Island - a spit of land in the northeastern U.S. He is a professional web designer and travel junkie with an unhealthy addiction to backpacking, camping, hiking and seeing the world. He enjoys knit hats, small, declarative sentences and speaking in the third person.



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[...] interesting site for the new hobo is here. Apparently, the hobos of yore had a system of signs to alert one another of what was going on [...]