Khaled in Youngstown, Ohio, is designing an album cover for his band’s latest release and wants to use a grawlix, a string of symbols that stands in for profanity. Beetle Bailey cartoonist Mort Walker coined the term in his 1980 book The Lexicon of...
Researchers have found that stress is a leading cause of plewds — you know, those drops of sweat popping off the foreheads of nervous cartoon characters. That’s one of several cartooning terms coined by Mort Walker, creator of the Beetle...
If your friend says she’s coming to town Sunday week, exactly when should you expect to see her? What do you call those typographical symbols cartoonists use in place of profanity? Plus grass widows, the linguistic phenomenon called creaky...
Lindsay from San Diego asked about a word for the typographical symbols that stand in for profanity, like @#$%!^*)!&!. The term is grawlix. Cartoonist Mort Walker included it in his humorous book Lexicon of Comicana, where he catalogued visual...

