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January 07, 2004

Hobo Runes

Other than human beings, I suppose, pretty much everything worth caring about can be categorized using two mutually exclusive rubrics: that which is funny and that which is cool. Some things are cute that are neither funny nor cool, but I don't care about those.

Some cool things are:

• Robots
• Outer Space
• Medieval Warfare
• Explosions

Another cool thing is cryptology and encoded messages, especially those that don't require a computer to be solved.

We live in a literal society. That is why cynicism is so rampant; it is a reaction to the lack of abstraction and indirectness that we evolved to understand.

For tens of thousands of years our societies developed to appreciate the meaning of patterns in the stars at night, and to interpret weather as communication from the gods.

But now we know better and are left with digits and clarity.

Still, there is one place where ciphers are (were) used for communication - ciphers that would not be understood by someone not in the know: hobo runes. Hobo runes are cool.

The modern equivalent is 'warchalking', where people make marks to indicate to others where to find unprotected WiFi Internet access they can use.

But hobo runes are much richer than that, and are interesting since they are a sort of modern hieroglyphics, based partly on English, but mostly on pictograms and something much closer to the mind than typical written language, which is so far abstracted from the things that are represented by words, that it may as well have been created out of nothing. (Onomatopeia being the exception).

Some runes are easy to understand.

But some are more abstract

Some have inscrutable etymologies

And some seem almost kabbalistic.

I grabbed the above images from here, and there are other, similar sites here, here, here, and here.

Posted by mslaybau at January 7, 2004 09:32 AM

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