Symbol swearing with the Grawlix

I miss a lot of things about the decline of paper newspapers, especially the comic strips. The comics were verbal humor with pictures and recurring characters, and the language of the comics provided a window into how spoken language was represented in print.

I was particularly taken with the swearing symbols known as grawlixes. That’s a term coined by Charles D. Rice of This Week magazine, and popularized by the Beetle Baily creator Mort Walker. Typically, Walker’s grawlixes came from blustery Sarge, cursing at his men for being slackers. As an artist, Walker didn’t limit himself to punctuation marks, sometimes adding hand-drawn lightning bolts, stars, squiggles and jagged lines as well. For those of us who are not artists, a grawlix is typically made from the characters on top of the number row of a keyboard: the at-sign (@), the pound sign (#), the dollar sign ($), the percent sign (%), the ampersand (&), and the asterisk (*), along with the exclamation mark.

Symbol swearing didn’t begin with Mort Walker or Charles Rice. Examples have been traced back to newspaper comics around the turn of the turn-of-the-(twentieth)-century like The Katzenjammers Kids, by the German immigrant Rudolf Dirks, and the Lady Bountiful strip by Gene Carr. And the Belgian comics historian Thierry Smolderen spotted an even earlier use in a 160-page book from 1877 called Lightning Flashes and Electric Dashes: A Volume of Choice Telegraphic Literature, Humor, Fun, Wit & Wisdom. Grawlixes made their way to comic books as well as strips, particularly under the Comics Code Authority which lasted from 1954 till 2011. In an early issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, Daily Bugle editor J. Jonah Jameson complains that he doesn’t have “one %$!!?#$#!* photographer” to cover a big story. Along with their use in comics and comic books, grawlixes have also shown up in book and television show titles. There was the short-lived CBS comedy $#*! My Dad Says, adapted from the 2011 book Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern.  

Grawlixes, or obscenicons as linguist Ben Zimmer has dubbed them, call to mind the so-called minced oaths of Shakespeare and other Elizabethan dramatists: gadzooks for “By God’s hooks” and zounds for “By God’s wounds,” or the replacement forms gosh darn, heck, fudge, and so on. And they serve the same purpose as abbreviations like SOB and WTF. Such replacements simultaneously pretend to protect readers from being offended and protect writers from stepping over a line. Sometimes propriety is maintained by replacing all but the first letter with a hyphenated –word, as in the title of Jesse Sheidlower’s splendid study The F-Word. On occasion you can see the label censored replacing a bit of swearing, or in some older journalistic practice the phrase [expletive deleted].

We probably don’t want to consider a single * to be a grawlix, but rather a redaction, and the * is pretty common in book titles. There is Adam Mansbach’s book Go the F*ck to Sleep, whose cover replaces the missing vowel with a moon, Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, andMelissa Mohr’s Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing.  

Grawlixes like $#*! or replacements like sh*t sometimes need to be read aloud. $#*! My Dad Says was referred to as Bleep My Dad Says on air, but the full word was used in the audiobook. The same is the case for Go the F*ck to Sleep and Holy Sh*t. It’s hard to imagine pronouncing the *s.

Redacted forms and grawlixes also offer some complications to indexers as well. The Guidelines for Alphabetical Arrangement of Letters and Sorting of Numerals and Other Symbols put out by the National Information Standards Organization advises alphabetizing symbols before numbers and letters (and putting numbers before letters). But practices seem to vary. The index to Micheal Adams’s In Praise of Profanity, indexes shit before s**t and fuck before both f–k and f**k. However, the very first entry in that index is @#%&*! Smilers, a reference to the 2008 album by singer-songwriter Aimee Mann. Grawlixes and redactions are increasingly rare, but there’s a lot to them. No $#*!

_{Featured image by vocablitz on Pixabay.}