GRAWLIX

A comic-strip balloon containing symbols to indicate profanity.

The word was the creation of the cartoonist Mort Walker. He first used it in 1964 in an article he wrote for the National Cartoonists Society in the US and which he then included in his 1980 book The Lexicon of Comicana, a satire on the comic devices that cartoonists use but which ironically became a textbook for art students.

Under the heading of maledicta, the term that encompasses obscenity and other offensive language, he included four terms for graphically euphemistic devices: jarns, quimps and nittles as well as grawlixes. It would be hard to provide definitions that distinguish between these — they are all symbols and squiggles of various sorts — though his illustration for a grawlix is of what he calls “obstensibly obliterated epithets”, or scribbled-out words. Of the four, grawlix has gained the greatest currency, though it remains rare.

Mort Walker’s book contains a lot of other terms that he invented for various comic-artist graphical conventions, including waftarom, squean, neoflect, spurl, plewd, vite, dite, hite, direct-a-tron (and throwatron, staggeratron, sailatron, swishatron ...), jigg, crottle-eyed, briffit, whiteope, indotherm and solrad. No, I’m not going to define any of them, not least because you can really only do it by illustrating them, as Walker did. Buy his book if you’re interested — it’s still in print.

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