If you have ever listened to Phlash Phelps on SiriusXM radio, you know he has taken just about every road in the United States, remembers all the places and their names, and is a king of trivia. We were listening to him recently, and heard a new word, never heard by us before: grawlix.
When we got home from our little drive, we looked it up in the dictionary. Yup, there it was, added to Merriam-Webster Dictionary in June 2018.
You’ve seen a grawlix before, especially if you ever read the comics section of a newspaper. But you probably didn’t know that the thing had a name. Grawlix is the name for the character or series of characters that appear in place of profanity – the comics’ version of bleeping out a word.
A grawlix is made from the characters that can be found on the (upper case) number row on your computer keyboard: the at sign (@), the pound sign (#), the dollar sign ($), the percent sign (%), the ampersand (&) and the asterisk (*).
The first use of grawlixes in comics can be found in the comic strip Katzenjammer Kids in the 1920s, but the creation of the term grawlix is credited to the late cartoonist Mort Walker (1923-2018), creator of Beetle Bailey, which debuted in 1950. He coined a number of terms for situations created in comic drawing, and he collected them in a book, The Lexicon of Comicana, published in 1980. Other coinages from Walker include briffit, for the cloud of dust left when a character makes a hasty getaway, and plewds for the drops of sweat that are shown when a character is under stress. Bet you didn’t know these had names either!
