Grawlix

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Lindsay Pearson and I’m calling from San Diego.

Well, hello Lindsay, what’s going on?

Well, there’s something that’s been on my mind for some time now. It’s a question that my friend Peter and I came up with. Basically, when somebody swears, say, on TV or on the radio, it gets bleeped out somehow, right?

Mm—

But when it’s in print, you see a combination of symbols in the place of the swear word. You know, pound signs and exclamation points and things like that. And I was wondering if there’s a term for this, for that group of symbols that represents a swear word.

So you’re talking about the kind of just seemingly random punctuation that’s used, say, in comics or in humorous columns. It’s not the kind of sort of thing you’d usually see in a regular newspaper story right there. They would just use asterisks or blanks, right?

Right, and sometimes it’s four symbols. Sometimes it’s a string of ten or more.

Right.

Yeah.

Well, the best word I know for this is growlicks.

Grawlix.

How do you spell that?

You spell it G-R-A-W-L-I-X, Lindsay. How do you like that?

Grawlix.

Oh, I like the sound of it.

Yeah.

It’s a fantastic word. This word, Martha, who was it? Mort Walker, right?

Yeah, there’s a funny story about this word because, you know, Mort Walker, the guy who is the cartoonist who does Beetle Bailey and High and Lois?

Okay.

Yeah. Well, he once wrote a book, a joking book called the, what was it, Lexicon of Comicana, which was a book about all the little markings that you see in cartoons to indicate stuff, the visual vocabulary of cartoons, like when somebody’s sweating, you know, they’re really nervous and all these little sweat droplets come off of them.

He called those pludes.

Pludes.

P-L-E-U-D-S. And he made up this word, Grawlix, G-R-A-W-L-I-X.

Wait a second. I don’t think he made it up. He borrowed it from Charlie Rice, who used it in the 1930s.

Okay.

All right. Well, he put it into this book, and it was a collection of these kinds of words. And he was doing it as a joke, but it kind of caught on. And now a lot of cartoonists use those terms.

Well, that was simple.

Yeah, there’s a ton of that stuff. We’re going to post some links to the website to some really interesting posts online, stories, articles that people have written about this topic. One fellow has a bunch of little diagrams of Grawlixes from 1911 to about 1977 and just kind of shows the different ways and forms that they’ve been used. It’s really interesting.

Lindsay, another one that I really like is, you know, when somebody in a cartoon is they’ve either been drinking too much from a jug marked XXX, or they’ve been conked in the head and they have these little starbursts or circles kind of going around their head. It’s called squeans, S-Q-U-E-A-N-S, squeans. So there’s this whole visual vocabulary that some cartoonists use, and growlicks is one of those terms.

Refresh me here. He invented these. It was kind of a gag or a satire, right?

Yeah, yeah, but then it kind of caught on accidentally.

So what do you think about that, Lindsay?

Oh, I love it. I love it that it comes from comic books. I’ve always been a comic book fan.

Excellent.

What were you and your friend Peter talking about that you needed to know this?

Well, it started out talking about when you sign letters with XO, XO, and what that means. And I had heard it on the show, of course, that the X was the kiss and the O is the hug. And then from there, we started thinking of other combinations of letters and symbols that we could sign letters with and what they would mean. And then all of a sudden I started seeing symbols everywhere, and I started trying to figure out what they could mean, and it became like a game. Trying to figure out what the symbols, what these growlixes mean.

-huh.

-huh.

So you had little sweat droplets coming off of your head because you were thinking so hard about it.

Little pludes.

Exactly.

Well, they are a lot of fun, and we will post a bunch of them to our website.

Great.

All right.

Thank you so much, Lindsay.

Thank you, Lindsay.

Thank you.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

You know, Grant, another one of those that I really love is the Leukaflect. Do you remember what that is?

Yeah.

No, what is that one?

It’s like a shiny spot on a surface of something. You know how it looks like a little window, you know, like a big round bomb that’s about to go off and it’s shiny. It looks like a little, it has a little Leukaflect on it.

Well, we welcome your question about punctuation and letters and anything that’s mysterious. We’d like to solve your mystery. Give us a call, 1-877-929-9673. That’s 1-877-WAYWORD. You can send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.