Lessons learned from Beetle Bailey and Yosemite Sam
Ah, language!
Someone recently asked in conversation—quite innocently and without any thoughts of follow-up—what those symbols used in word balloons in the comics are called. You know the ones: when a character is obviously using some kind of obscenity but the cartoonist instead turns it into a string of symbols. In comics, the symbols are creative: lightning bolts and storm clouds, explosions and firing guns, skulls and cross-bones and shaking fists, knives and hammers. In common use, the symbols are less artistic and frequently just use the shifted characters above the numbers one through eight on most keyboards: !@#$%^&*.
What is that called when you substitute characters like this, for this specific purpose? Is there a name for it at all?
Yes, there is: grawlix.
You might assume that both this practice and the word for it go back a very long way, but that’s not the case for either. Bear in mind that the idea of the comic or comic strip is itself fairly modern: art that we’d recognize as related to modern comics, in the form of editorial cartoons, goes back to the early 19th century; the word “cartoon” was in fact commandeered to poke fun at the “cartoons” (a kind of visual design proposal) displayed in the British Parliament in that time period. What we think of more properly as a comic strip was established by the mid 1890s.
The convenience—one might say “desperate need”—of obscuring obscenities led to the use of symbols instead of letters fairly soon after. Ben Zimmer has done great leg work on this and found the (so far) earliest use in 1902 (it’s a short piece, worth a quick read; Zimmer’s Slate piece is a summary of several related posts on Language Log).
The idea spread quickly, but it seems to have existed without a label until 1964 when Mort Walker, the artist behind Beetle Bailey, tagged them with the term “grawlix.” The name stuck and has been familiar to most comic artists since.
Do other terms exist? Zimmer favors “obscenicon” and others also mention “maledicta.” Maledicta appears to sometimes be used in linguistics, but typically to refer to curse words or swear words in general, so that doesn’t seem precise enough.
I’m not entirely sure about obscenicon for two reasons. Zimmer uses it as a portmanteau, a conflation of two terms that creates something both new and recognizable. It’s “obscenity” (or “obscene“) and “icon” merged. We could split hairs and note that “profanicon” or “expleticon” would probably be more technically accurate, but let’s not because obscenicon has a certain ring to it—and language is more useful when it’s appealing.
As Zimmer suggests, obscenicon is a word with an obvious meaning to a contemporary reader because of the words used to create it. But it’s one of those words that was created while another perfectly good word (grawlix) already existed. The -icon suffix makes it seem derivative of emoticon, although in truth the objects it describes have existed longer and have a more colorful history.
Grawlix, on the other hand, is a very unusual word, but it suggests something drawn (“graw” echoing “draw”), something guttural (“grawl” close to “growl”), while “lix” gives it a Latinate resonance and an air of authority (it’s close to “lex,” Latin for law, but echoes the ending of “prolix,” used to describe speech or writing that goes on too long). It’s been suggested that Walker coined grawlix as a nonsense word, but I suspect there was a little more going on behind the scenes. After all, Walker was no dope, having worked at a high level within Hallmark Cards for a bit and having served as an intelligence officer during World War II. He published an entire volume on “The Lexicon of Comicana.” To assume his choices were entirely random nonsense is probably unwise. There’s no way to prove he was thinking about etymology, but it doesn’t seem a stretch.
My second objection to obscenicon is that it echoes the naming of fan conventions. There’s Worldcon, Comic-Con, Gen Con, Readercon, and more “cons” worldwide of all sorts than you can shake a stick at. Obscenicon sounds like a weekend gathering devoted to creative profanity, or cosplay that goes beyond risque, or the worst of offensive online behavior…or all of the above. When using a word is likely to cause confusion, I’ll err on the side of not using it. Grawlix wins over obscenicon.
While poking around for this piece, I came across a few other interesting points involved in, or related to, grawlix. The real point of a grawlix is to express an emotion, not words. That’s why a cartoonist can have so much fun with these substitutions. Some uses, however, are done purely to slip the words past censors or other prudes—they violate the spirit (but not the letter) of a grawlix.
A terrific example is the short-lived CBS TV series “$#*! My Dad Says” (2010-11, based on the Twitter feed honestly called “Shit My Dad Says”). There’s a grawlix in its title. There’s a subtle difference in usages like that one, as the substitute characters are clearly being used to hint at the letters they’re replacing. It would be the same as calling someone an “@$$#@13” or telling them to “f^@k off” in an online post…it’s pretty clear which letter each character is meant to indicate. Is that still a grawlix? I suppose so, but there’s probably a better word out there for it.
Trying to unpack a true grawlix should be more like attempting to transcribe Yosemite Sam: everyone hears something a little different. Most people hear something along the lines of “rassa-frassin, rickin frackin” but a former co-worker was sure the best shorthand for every Sam line was “dizzum frazzits.” Who’s to argue? Many syllables would work fine in that space, and the more to choose from the better chance you’ll find the right combination for a particular situation.
The pinnacle of Sam speak is probably “From Hare to Heir.” Here’s a compilation of “Sam-isms” from that episode.
Of course, Sam can be reinterpreted as well. I’m a frequent user of closed-captioning, and I can attest that there are some absolutely hilarious mis-captions out there, either deliberately or ignorantly. I have many times seen horrendous accidental transcription errors, but also replacements of non-curse words and occasional substitutions of indiscreet terms for innocuous original dialog.
Speaking of a transcription of Sam, here’s the episode referenced above. How close does this seem to you? Note that at least one of Sam’s “audible grawlixes” is simply transcribed as “muttering under his breath.” The transcriptionist seems to have given up on others, in one place defaulting to “:cursing stream:“
thebettereditor 