Somewhat sceptical (who could remember all that?)
Spotted making the rounds on Twitter, what looks like a cutting from a C19th magazine about flirting using various items of dress such as gloves, handkerchiefs, and parasols, and the meaning of the various ways they can be deployed.
This is a bit like those 'language of fans' pieces: everybody probably needed a cheat-sheet to work out whether the intended message was 'meet me in the conservatory in 5 minutes' or 'get lost, creep', and anyway, as someone remarked, if the code was that well-known presumably the chaperones were on to it too.
(See also, The Language of Flowers, which seems to have troubling variations leading to potential misreading of messages, not to mention, if known to be a symbolic language, probably not exactly a secret and discreet means of communication.)
Unless, of course, it was one of those things that changed all the time like teenage slang so that by the time you got an article revealing the translation it was well behind the curve. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2227627.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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