I've never learned a foreign language, but I do know a secret language--Gregg shorthand. I learned it in high school, back in the dark ages when it was a requirement for getting a secretarial job. I don't suppose anyone uses it anymore, but I still know it, and still use it occasionally to write notes.
The other night a friend sent me a link to a site called Symbols.com, which is a HUGE collection of symbols of all kinds, from all kinds of industries and countries and mythologies. As I was looking through it (and I could have looked through it for HOURS), I noticed the hobo symbols, which have always intrigued me.
I remember my mother talking about hobos coming to their house in the country when she was a little girl, and her mother--my grandmother--would always feed them. My favorite hobo sign has always been this one:
("good place for a handout") or this one:
("you can sleep in the hayloft").
Of course, we'd have to have this one on our house:
("man with gun lives here")
I used to have a font with hobo symbols, but apparently had never downloaded it or converted it for the Mac, so I went looking for it today. I found it, along with a Morse Code font.
Just like how reading a vampire novel always makes me go get out my silver cross and wear it for awhile, and reading a story about someone being stuck someplace in the dark makes me go dig out a pocket flashlight to carry until several days or weeks have passed and I haven't used it, and take it out of my bag, a couple of things this week have made me want to learn Morse Code.
I've been listening to Nevada Barr's Blind Descent in the car for the past couple of weeks; briefly, it's about a group of people going down into a cave to rescue someone who has been injured, and a mystery story grows from there. At one point, there's a cave-in and people are trapped, and in order to communicate with the people on the other side of the newly-formed wall, someone asks, "Does anybody know Morse Code?" (Of course, this one made me both want to learn Morse Code and carry a flashlight.)
And then the other night I was watching a movie on television--a fairly bad movie, but it was the only thing I could find, and I wanted to watch something and knit--called, I think, Executive Decision. It starred Kurt Russell and Steven Segal, and was about a highjacked plane, and the necessity to communicate without radios with another plane came up; I wasn't really watching that closely, but somehow someone rigged the plane's taillights so they could flash on and off, and they sent a message using Morse Code.
Let's see . . . what other secret languages do I know? Braille, sort of. It's almost incomprehensible to me that blind people can learn to read Braille by touching it with their fingertips, but they obviously can. Many years ago, I ran across a course being taught in Braille translations, with the goal of becoming involved as a translator, and I thought it might be fun to try, so I signed up.
That was around the time that we'd gotten our first computer, an Apple IIC, and there was a software program available for it. I typed in my homework, then printed it out on the dot matrix printer and mailed it in to the instructor. She would critique it and send it back. I did it for a few months, and then the woman who was running the program died, and I was a little unhappy because the instructor (having been a high school teacher, I think) was a little like a drill instructor, and not very kind or helpful, so I quit. But I still remember enough to read the floor designations on elevators and the names on the tops of McDonald's soft drink lids.
