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...
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...
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...
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...
