Is There a Grammar for “Grawlixes”?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

This is Khaled Tabara. How’s it going?

Khaled? Like K-H-A-L-E-D or something like that?

Absolutely perfect.

Okay, great. Well, welcome to the show, Khaled. How can we help you?

And where are you, by the way?

Yeah, where are you?

I am in Youngstown, Ohio.

Okay.

Youngstown, all right.

What’s on your mind?

I’m a musician, and we were working on album artwork, and we wanted to put in a swear word,

But we wanted to use that symbolic representation of swear words, like in comic books,

Where there’s an app symbol and a hash and stuff.

And so I started kind of looking into, like, if there was any rules or if there was any system

Or if they had to correspond a certain way, and I couldn’t find anything.

I couldn’t even find a list of, like, acceptable symbols, like, what are you allowed to use?

You know what I mean?

Can you use, you know, question mark and different ones?

I ran into a word called Grawlix.

Yep.

I couldn’t find much more about what I was kind of looking for,

Which is basically like, are there any rules?

Is there a specific way to use them?

Or is it just kind of a free-for-all?

So I ran into that word, but I really couldn’t find anything else

Besides it’s just a word that kind of defines it, if that makes sense.

Yeah, well, Khaled, we can tell you more about Grawlix’s,

But I have to ask, what kind of musician are you,

And why aren’t you using profanity on the album?

It’s a children’s album, right?

No.

It’s not at all.

No, it’s a rock album, and we absolutely, it would be fine to do it.

But it was actually just inside the cover, and we’re just kind of friendly and just kind of being silly about it.

Okay.

And so I was just trying to figure out how to do it.

It worked totally with the artwork to be kind of quirky and comic book-y.

Okay, okay, kind of retro.

So let’s talk about that word Grawlix for a second.

It’s G-R-A-W-L-I-X.

That’s what you found.

Yeah.

And that refers to the symbols overall.

And it comes from, you probably remember this, Beatle Bailey, the guy who made Beatle Bailey, Mort Walker.

Oh, yeah.

Walker, right?

I do, yeah.

In 1980, he published a book called The Lexicon of Comicana, which talked about all these symbols and the variety of ways that a cartoonist gets across movement and sound and emotion without using words.

So the way that they might do a reflection on, draw a reflection on a windowpane in order to show that it’s actually a windowpane, things like that.

Yeah.

And that came out of years of him encountering people, asking him questions about, what do you call that?

What is the rule for that?

What do you know about that?

So he decided just to make up all these words.

And here we are, 35 years later, and some of those words that he invented have caught on, including the word growlets itself.

But it’s still pretty much up to the cartoonist or the illustrator to use them as they wish.

I think you’re looking for that magical combination that says, there’s a naughty word here.

But we don’t want you to know what it is, right?

But we just want you to know that there is one.

There’s not exactly a grammar of growlicks.

There’s not like one set that means this word and one set that means that word.

And there’s not like a letter for letter code or anything like that, letter to symbol code.

The more I thought about it, that started to be, that started to make a lot of sense.

Because at first I thought there really should be like, okay, you’re allowed to use one word, one letter at the beginning, one letter at the end.

You know, I was trying to find some kind of system.

And the more I thought about it, I went, well, if there’s a system, isn’t that kind of just swearing?

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

It does the job, right, without actually having to know the word.

Right.

One thing to note is that for a long time, a lot of that sort of symbolic cursing in comics wasn’t typography.

It wasn’t a hashtag or necessarily an exclamation mark or the stranger symbols on the keyboard that we don’t use that often.

Instead, it was lightning bolts and clouds and different things like that.

And so it’s when we use the type of wingdings.

Yeah, exactly.

So when we use typography now, we’re actually like in the second or third generation away from what it originally was.

Oh, that’s really cool.

Yeah, but do whatever you want.

Whatever like indicates like we only kind of mean it, but we a little mean it.

And it’s actually not really a bad word, but it’s one that we don’t want to put here.

Yeah.

And also just whatever looks good, I think.

Oh, yeah, sure.

You don’t want it to look too much like it either.

Like, you know what I mean?

Like the app kind of looks like an A or kind of.

Right.

Right.

Or it could be an E or an O.

Right.

Right. The schwa.

Yeah, we just tried it, and we just kind of rolled with it and went, yeah, they’re going to know what we mean.

That’s the way to do it.

And if you put it in a speech bubble, then it’s even clearer.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

But do look up that book. It’s not widely available, The Lexicon of Comic-Con.

You can find it in reprints here and there and used bookstores.

It’s a lot of fun, and Mort Walker was an interesting cartoonist who was really heavily into the craft of cartooning.

So that’s part of the reason why the words that he invented caught on.

I’d like to see the finished product, Khaled.

And hear it, too.

I’ll have to send you guys some.

Sure.

I honestly, friends of mine, we love the show.

Like, literally, everyone in the band, we listen to it when we drive and stuff.

We actually have, like, references.

Like, on the new record, we kind of were counting.

There’s, like, three or four things that are directly influenced.

We’ve listened to every single episode.

We use, like, Scratch of Dawn in a song.

What?

Drop a Dime.

Nice.

And we get to Gun Mall.

There’s lyrics that have worked their way in because we’re all kind of word nerds.

And we all like the show.

So when you hear something that inspires you, you kind of take it and you sneak it into one of your songs.

We were joking about it when I told everyone I was going to talk to you guys.

They went, oh, you should tell them.

And I went, they don’t care.

How cool is that?

Yeah, what’s the name of your band?

So we can look for it.

It’s called The Zoo.

Z-O-U.

The Z-O-U.

T-H-E.

Z-O-U.

The Zoo.

Z-O-U.

All right.

Yeah.

And send us an MP3 or something, too.

Maybe the cover art so we can see how you used those Grawlix.

So you can see how we used it.

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay.

Thank you very much, Colin.

Really nice to talk to you.

All right.

Take care.

Thank you, guys.

Bye-bye.

I love the show.

Thank you again.

All right.

Bye-bye.

We’d like to talk with you about language, so call us, 877-929-9673.