On a recent visit to Sheboygan, Wis., I stopped by an Art Preserve dedicated to outsider art, just outside of town. I spent time on every floor, but it wasn’t until I was on my way out that I realized the stairwell was part of the art, too. The bricks in the masonry were positioned to represent “hobo symbols”: markings that vagabonds and travelers used to communicate with one another, chiefly during the Great Depression. (That these symbols were referred to as a “hobo” code is further evidence of their outdatedness.) The code consisted of symbols, covertly scrawled and etched along roads. Travelers could give directions, indicate the home of a kind person or a hot meal, or warn one another of police activity. A semicircle with a dot in the middle, for instance, was drawn one way to represent the police keeping their eyes “open” for vagabonds — in which case the area should be avoided by passers-by — and another way to represent the eyes closed, in which case one might pass safely through. A New York Times reporter described these symbols as equal parts hieroglyphic and pocket traveler; one expert called them “the Diners Club cards of the dispossessed.” I wondered, as I drove home, how many puzzle-loving tourists had come across those symbols before me and tried to decipher the code. I mean, who could look at these wingding shapes, lines, arrows, Xs and Os without scanning for a pattern that cracked it all open? Who could resist trying to differentiate the zigzags that meant “danger” from those that meant “dog” — or “dangerous dog,” for that matter? On May 6 of this year, Wyna Liu’s Connections took word association to its conceptual extremes with a board made up of abstract lines, squares and circles. It wasn’t the first time Wyna had experimented with form, but this one felt particularly diabolical. These weren’t words, I insisted (after I’d used up all my mistakes and lost)! But as I think about it now, I’m not sure there’s much of a difference. Identifying FLAG DESIGNS among a series of dots and lines isn’t so different from finding PALINDROMES, is it? Both focus on shape over meaning. Seeing buttons in circles, buckles in squares and laces in hashmarks is about visualizing meaning in shape, just as recognizing all of the things that “X” can mean — ADULT, KISS, TEN, TIMES — is about recognizing a letter shape’s symbolic potential. A semicircle is an eye; an eye is an I; I is “me” or “iodine” or the No. 1. We have so many ways of traveling through language, so many codes we can use to explore the boundaries of meaning. So: Where to, next?
Solve Today’s Capture
Puzzle of the WeekThis week, check out the Tuesday, Sept. 8. puzzle by Sunny Maharjan, 19, in his New York Times Crossword debut. In his constructor notes, he shares that he’s been constructing crosswords since high school. “The idea for this puzzle came from rather unglamorous origins: A friend flaked on our plans after I had already gotten onto the subway to meet up,” he wrote. Looking up from his phone “in frustration,” Maharjan adds that “an idea flashed into my mind” when he saw a particular storefront. For more tips and insights into this puzzle, read the Wordplay column.
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