Cultural Codes (Cultural Literacies)
Verbal phrases, names, titles, images, conventional examples, and other brief representations that function in a culture or sub-culture as references to complex ideas, situations, judgments, and narratives through a common stock of allusions and mental associations.
"Social short-hand or short-cuts to meaning"
Cultural codes--celebrity names or images, titles of songs or movies, names or images of places--serve in a society as a kind of vocabulary of ideas and values