It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when people disagreed over the best word to use when answering the phone. Alexander Graham Bell suggested answering with ahoy! but Thomas Edison was partial to hello! A fascinating new book about...
In response to our conversation about how to handle swearing in high-school classrooms, a longtime teacher shares a strategy that works for her. She insists that anytime students want to swear in her presence, they should instead say the words moo...
A high-school teacher in Los Angeles, California, says many of his teaching colleagues have different opinions about how to handle profanity among teenagers. The simplest solution is to prohibit all taboo language in the classroom, but acknowledge...
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...
Susan from San Marcos grew up hearing her grandfather distinguish between cursing and cussing: cursing was for a “slow mind,” while cussing could be playful and inventive. His family-safe substitutes for profanity included elaborate strings such as...
What are those symbols cartoonists use in place of profanity? They’re called grawlixes — good to know for the next time you play a game we just invented called “Comic Strip Jargon or Pokemon?” This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Comic...