LINGUISTS BREAK GRAFFITI CODE

Los Angeles, CA
November 22, 2005

UCLA professors held a press conference yesterday to announce the stunning news that they have finally deciphered the elusive "graffiti code".

The code has been used for years in most large cities, showing up on street signs, trash cans, even trees of the poorer, smellier parts of town. Long thought to be the basic scribbles of the illiterate, graffiti tagging was largely ignored until about two years ago when Dr. Maxwell Shlitz had a thought.

"I figured that maybe we weren't putting enough currency into tagging," exclaimed the noted linguist. "It just seemed that there was just so much of it that maybe, just maybe, it wasn't the ramblings of the crack addicted. My partner, Dr Heinaman, and myself set out to see if there wasn't more to the story. Turns out there was more than we ever realized."

Much to the surprise of researchers, they found tagging is really a basic form of coded communication for the inner city youths. The message, however, is anything but menacing.

"We kept coming up with the same translation over and over again. At first we thought there must be some mistake, but our calculations were in fact accurate. We found that almost all graffiti tags are personal ads for gay men. Shocker, huh?"

Sociologists have long suspected that the gang culture is steeped in homosexuality with its obsession with working out and "rumbling" with other men. The crotch grabbing and baggy pants pulled down were all too obvious signs that are now verified by the cracking of the graffiti code.

"We are just the linguists, we really don't know what implications this will have in the long term, but I think this will affect 50 Cents newest album sales," theorized Dr. Heinaman.

No word has come out of the gang leadership on the news.