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...
The curved lines that follow the moving limbs of cartoon characters? Those are called blurgits or swalloops. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Comic Strip Motion Lines” Oh, by gee, by gosh, by gum, by Joe. Oh, by Joe, oh, by Joe...
Solrads are those lines radiating from the sun or a lightbulb in a comic strip, while dites are the diagonal lines on a smooth mirror. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Solrads” There are a lot more of these Mort Walker terms for...
Twittering, tweeting, twirting—it’s rare to see a whole new body of language appear right before your eyes. But that’s what’s happening with Twitter. We discuss the snappy new shorthand of the twitterati. Also, why do people feel compelled to say...
Is there a word for @#$%!^*)!&!, those typographical symbols standing in for profanity? There is indeed. It’s grawlix—not to be confused with jarns, quimps, nittles, lucaflects, or plewds. For more on such terms, check out Mort Walker’s Private...
