Many of us now use the word hobo to refer to any home­less indi­vid­ual, but back in the Amer­i­ca of the late 19th and ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, to be a hobo meant some­thing more. Liv­ing such a lifestyle on the mar­gins of soci­ety demand­ed the mas­tery of cer­tain tech­niques as well as a body of secret knowl­edge, an aspect of the hey­day of hobodom sym­bol­ized in the “hobo code,” a spe­cial hiero­glyph­ic lan­guage explained in the Vox video above. Hash­tags sig­naled dan­ger ahead, like bad water or an inhos­pitable town.”Hash­tags sounds a bit Mil­len­ni­al for hobo cul­ture, but on some lev­el the term does make sense. Some of the abstract­ed sym­bols of the hobo code look a bit more like emo­ji: a loco­mo­tive mean­ing “good place to catch a train,” a build­ing with a barred door mean­ing “this is a well-guard­ed house,” a cat mean­ing “a kind lady lives here.” But how much use did the hobo code actu­al­ly see? The hobo has gone, but the char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly hardy hobo spir­it finds a way to live on.