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Guess what, Will?
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What s up, Mango?
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I ve been trying to write a promo for our podcast, Part-Time Genius, but even though we ve done over 250 episodes, we don t really talk about murders or cults.
0
SPEAKER_03
I mean, we did just cover the Illuminati of cheese, so I feel like that makes us pretty edgy.
0
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We also solve mysteries like how Chinese is your Chinese food and how do dollar stores make money?
0
SPEAKER_03
And then, of course, can you game a dog show?
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SPEAKER_03
So what you re saying is everyone should be listening.
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Listen to Part-Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
0
SPEAKER_04
Hey, and welcome to Short Stuff.
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I m Josh, and there s Chuck.
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What are you going to do about it, Short Stuff?
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Yeah, this is called Outdated Names for People Edition.
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I guess so.
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So a lot of this came from the NSA, the National Security Agency, the one that s been spying on Americans for decades now.
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And they basically hid behind hobos when they were talking about tramps and bums, which I assume is what you re talking about.
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But they re like, according to hobos, this is what this means.
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Yeah, these are old terms used back then.
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So just know we re not suggesting that anyone call an unhoused person a bum or a tramp.
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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.
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And the way that they put it is a hobo travels to work and works to travel.
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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.
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They travel by train, by car, however they can.
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We talked about them in the hitchhiking episode, if I remember correctly.
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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.
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They don t work.
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And then a bum, again, according to hobos, according to the NSA, neither travels nor works.
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So there you go.
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Thanks for putting that all on me.
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Well, I mean, you re the one that put this one together.
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We got to talk about it.
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You can t get around it.
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Hobos is what we re going to concentrate on, specifically, as you ll see in a minute here, hobo signs.
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But the word hobo itself, no one s really sure where that comes from.
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There are a bunch of
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ideas, as always, as to its origin.
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Some, you know, as usual, make more sense than others.
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One is H-O-E, ho-boy.
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Like, if you were traveling around working, you might have some farming tools, like a hoe.
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So you might have been a ho-boy, which could have become hobo.
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I d say that is maybe not so great.
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Oh, you re crazy.
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That s my number one.
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Oh, yeah?
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Mm-hmm.
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All right.
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Let me hear your pick, then.
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Where d the word hobo come from?
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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.
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But homeward bound, H-O-B-O, makes a little more sense to me.
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Sure.
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No, I would put that one at second.
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That s number two for you?
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We have to at least name check the other one real quick.
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Okay.
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So there s one that says that it was basically a shortened version of, hello boy, just a friendly greeting.
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And that that came to low boy, and then low bow, and then hobo.
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Yeah.
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I think that s a terrible idea as well, but it s hilarious to just say those different words in progression.
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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.
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I don t think it s that one.
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Yeah, I didn t.
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So when somebody s saying like bonus in the 90s, they were saying like good, I guess.
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It never occurred to me that they were speaking Latin.
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Sure.
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I m sure that s what was going on.
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So, let s just set up what we re really talking about here today, Chuck.
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We re talking about hobo signs, as I believe you said.
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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.
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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?
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Where can I get a free meal or something like that?
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You ve met varyingly with different kinds of attitudes.
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Yeah.
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And those attitudes are probably going to stay roughly the same over, you know, shorter spans of time, at least.
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So because you care about other hobos and because you don t really meet up with them very frequently, you would leave a sign.
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And this is what became hobo signs.
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There were signs that a hobo left for another hobo basically saying, like,
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This is a great place to get a free meal.
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Stay away from this house because this is where the local cop lives.
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All sorts of really useful information.
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And over time, essentially a codified system developed.
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Fantastic.
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What a great setup.
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Thank you.
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I appreciate that.
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All right.
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We ll take a break and we ll be right back to talk about what was on these signs right after this.
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Guess what, Bango?
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What s up, Will?
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So iHeart is giving us a whole minute to promote our podcast, Part-Time Genius.
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I know, that s why I spent my whole week composing a haiku for the occasion.
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SPEAKER_02
It s about my emotional journey in podcasting over the last seven years, and it s called Earthquake House.
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SPEAKER_03
Mango, I m going to cut you off right there.
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Why don t we just tell people about our show instead?
0
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, that s a better idea.
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So every week on Part-Time Genius, we feed our curiosity by answering the world s most important questions.
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Things like, when did America start dialing 911?
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SPEAKER_02
Is William Shatner s best acting work in Esperanto?
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Also, what happened to Esperanto?
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Plus, we cover questions like how Chinese is your Chinese food?
0
SPEAKER_03
How do dollar stores stay in business?
0
SPEAKER_03
And of course, is there an Illuminati of cheese?
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There absolutely is.
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And we are risking our lives by talking about it.
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But if you love mind-blowing facts, incredible history and really bad jokes, make your brains happy and tune in to Part-Time Genius.
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SPEAKER_03
Listen to Part-Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
0
SPEAKER_00
A new season of Bridgerton is here.
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SPEAKER_00
And with it, a new season of Bridgerton, the official podcast.
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I m your host, Gabrielle Collins.
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And this season, we are bringing fans even deeper into the ton.
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Colin Bridgerton has returned from his travels abroad.
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Is Betrothal written in the stars for the eligible bachelor?
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Meanwhile, the ton is reverberating with speculation of who holds Lady Whistledown s pen.
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We re discussing it all.
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I sit down with Nicola Coughlin, Luke Newton, Shonda Rhimes, and more to offer an exclusive peek behind the scenes of each episode of the new season.
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Watch season three of the Shondaland series on Netflix.
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Then, fall in love all over again by listening to Bridgerton, the official podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Subscribe to catch a new episode every Thursday.
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SPEAKER_04
Okay, so we talked about hobo signs and we re going to start talking about that again beginning now.
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Yeah, like you mentioned, you know, hobos lived a very, or at least fairly solitary life.
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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.
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They were temporary by, on purpose, basically.
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They were like charc or charcoal because
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Like you said, some certain people might have certain attitudes about someone coming through town looking for work.
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There are changes in attitudes.
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Oh, no.
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I m not going to do it.
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Thank you.
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RIP Jimmy Buffett.
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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.
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So that sign would need to be changed.
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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.
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Exactly.
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And so the signs, some of the signs that they developed just make intuitive sense.
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Like there s a top hat that was the sign that a wealthy person lived there.
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Yeah.
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A train engine would be a good spot to mark a train.
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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.
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If you were unsuccessful, you wouldn t go back and leave that sign that it was a good spot.
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you wouldn t be there anymore to leave the sign that it was a good spot.
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I just find that a head scratcher.
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But more often than not, oh, there was another one, a cross said that if you gin up some religious talk with the people who live here, they ll give you a free meal.
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I love that one.
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More often than not, though, they didn t really have any intuitive connection to what they were conveying, the symbols.
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Yeah, that cross one is really great, because at some point some hobo was not having much luck with the lady of the house.
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And then they started talking about Jesus.
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And she was like, would you like a slice of pie?
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Right.
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The guy s like, oh, OK, I got you.
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Apparently, George Washington was like that, but with horses instead of religious talk.
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I m not going to believe anything you ever say anymore, so.
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That one is true.
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That s a story from Gilbert Stewart, the famous portraitist, who couldn t get him to become at all like, like to smile at all.
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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.
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So Gilbert Stewart knew that for the rest of the sitting, he would just bring up horses and George Washington would just be up and chipper.
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Yeah, he said, let me flash a smile, let me see those pearly brown wooden teeth.
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So, all right, so you mentioned a few things that made sense, like the top hat and stuff like that.
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But there were also a lot of symbols in this code.
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that, you know, it was sort of the symbol of the hobo, that if you just look at it, it s not intuitive.
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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.
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No, no, no.
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That means you can use the telephone for free.
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A boxy U is a good camping spot.
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Some are just like, where did you get this?
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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.
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And that means that there s a doctor that lives there and you won t charge for medical attention.
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Like where would you possibly come up with that?
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I don t know.
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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.
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I
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Yeah, maybe they just kept adding to it.
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They were like, well, this one will be a sideways cross.
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They re like, no, that already means there s a Satanist that lives there.
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Okay, well, what about a sideways cross top of the circle?
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That s a Satanist who loves to talk too much.
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All right, what about one with three dots?
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And they re like, okay, doctor who doesn t charge for medical advice.
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Yeah, that s a good one.
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That s a real one, right?
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SPEAKER_02
Yeah, that was the one I was describing.
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Oh, the sideways cross.
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Right, right, right.
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Okay, so there s also a circle
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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.
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Steer clear, in other words.
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Yeah, a lot of these were like steer clear or go here, but they just had like an extra little layer of information too.
1
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Yeah, the only one that made any sense was the three perpendicular diagonal lines.
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Oh, that made sense?
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Was unsafe.
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I just thought it might mean like three strikes is usually a bad thing.
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OK.
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But I don t know.
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That s just a guess.
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OK.
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That made more sense than any of the rest of them, I think.
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So 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.
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We should probably say at this point, there are some people who don t believe that there ever actually was a codified roughly 50 signs that hobos used to leave to one another.
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There s a group called the Historical Graffiti Society that Atlas Obscura profiled some years back.
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And these people search for those things and they re like, I wish this would I would be proven wrong because I want to find them.
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I ve never found anything like that.
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They think that it s possible that the whole thing was generated by early 20th century media fascination with hobo and the hobo lifestyle.
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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 of media.
1
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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 like fantastic books that were really popular and they think that the signs were introduced in there.
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To me, that doesn t mean that the whole thing was made up.
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Right, right.
1
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You know, I think that like
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Possibly it wasn t nearly as codified, but they re like, we ve never found a single one.
1
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And we found like they found some in chalk that are 100 years old, but they don t bear a resemblance to this.
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Instead, it s usually the first letter of whatever direction they were traveling, their nickname, and then maybe the year or the date.
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That s a genuine, documented, verified hobo science.
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Hobos definitely used those 100 plus years ago.
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Well, speaking of nicknames, we kind of have to mention one thing, right?
1
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Yeah.
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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.
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And I figured we could just go through a couple of these.
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Do you have a list by any chance?
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SPEAKER_01
Great idea.
1
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No, I have them all memorized.
1
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OK.
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Chili mix Wilma Benson.
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That s not bad.
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Fleece stick.
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Tommy lice comb.
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Let me see.
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Let me do one more.
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How about prostate Davey?
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So Hodgeman came up with 800 names.
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I ve never talked to him about that.
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I imagine that was arduous, and I m sure he never wanted to do that again.
1
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Because I think he also had people for years saying to create a hobo name for them and stuff like that.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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Yeah, for sure.
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And you d be like, no, I m not doing that.
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Yeah.
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Fun stuff, though.
1
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Just to wrap it up, there was an actual, like, there was documented hobo signs that seemed to have generated organically.
1
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And that it was called war chalking.
1
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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.
1
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And so a hobo would find some place where somebody had like a Wi-Fi router that didn t understand how to add like a security key to it.
1
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And so there was just free Wi-Fi.
1
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So they would leave a little mark for other hobos to say, like, you can get free Wi-Fi here.
1
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And then as people started to get savvier and added security to their routers, that kind of went away.
1
SPEAKER_01
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.
1
SPEAKER_01
So the whole premise of War Chalking lives in a very, very small window of time.
1
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I just find that fascinating.
1
SPEAKER_01
Interesting.
1
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I love it.
1
SPEAKER_01
I love it too, Chuck.
1
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And I love the short stuff.
1
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And the short stuff is out.
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SPEAKER_00
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
1
SPEAKER_00
For more podcasts of iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.