Welcome to the deep dive. We're really thrilled
to have you with us today. Yeah, we've got a
really fun topic lined up. Have you ever been
so completely utterly frustrated that you just
angrily mash the top row of your keyboard? Oh,
I mean, you know the exact feeling. Right. You're
typing out a text message or maybe firing off
a social media post, and you just hammer out
an at sign, a hashtag, a dollar sign. A percent
sign, maybe an ampersand. Exactly. And a heavy
exclamation point at the end. You hit send and
you just feel this tiny rush of satisfaction.
I do. It feels great. But without even realizing
it, in that moment of digital rage, you were
actually utilizing a highly specific 120 -year
-old typographical tool. It's crazy because we
rely on this this structured visual language
so heavily in our daily communication, but we
don't even process what we're doing. No, not
at all. We just operate on this collective assumption
that a cluster of unpronounceable punctuation
marks inherently equals a curse word. So today,
we are pulling from a fascinating stack of sources,
primarily anchored by a really comprehensive
Wikipedia article, to explore this bizarre linguistic
and visual phenomenon. Yeah, such a weird little
corner of history. The mission for this deep
dive is to figure out exactly how human beings
have creatively solved the problem of, well,
polite swearing in print for over a century.
Right. We're going to trace this strange concept
all the way from vintage ink -stained comic strips
right up to the modern smartphone sitting in
your pocket right now. It's quite a journey.
OK, let's unpack this. What exactly is this typographic
trick even called? So it's called Agrawlix. Agrawlix.
Yeah, spelled G -R -A -W -L -I -X. though sometimes
you'll also see it referred to as an obscenicon.
I love that. Obscenicon sounds like a convention
for supervillains or something. It really does.
But fundamentally, agraulics is just the use
of typographical symbols to replace profanity.
Usually those unpronounceable characters you
find on the shift number row of a keyboard, right?
Exactly. And the sources point out that these
aren't always just random jumbles of symbols
either. Oh, really? Yeah, sometimes there's this
deliberate typographical mimicry happening, like
a writer might use a dollar sign because it physically
mimics the curvature of the letter S. Oh, sure.
Or they might use an ad sign because it visually
resembles a lowercase a trapped inside a circle.
That makes total sense. It's been described as
the graphical equivalent of a bleep sensor on
television or radio. Yeah, that comparison to
an auditory bleep is it's usually the easiest
way to conceptualize what the symbols are actually
doing on the page. But wait, I want to push back
on that a little bit. If we break that down,
a television bleep is a literal auditory mask,
right? Right. It literally drowns out the sound
wave so your ear physically cannot process the
spoken word. Sure. But the growlix is supposed
to be a typographic mass. And honestly, it is
a terrible sensor. How do you mean? Well, I mean,
if I'm reading a sentence and I see a word that
starts with S, ends in T, and has a dollar sign
and a hashtag wedged in the middle, my brain
doesn't stop. No, of course not. I don't pause
in confusion. I immediately fill in the blank
and read the curse word in my head anyway. It
hasn't censored anything at all. What's fascinating
here is that the growlix doesn't actually exist.
to erase the word from your mind. That doesn't.
No, that's a fundamental misunderstanding of
its utility. It actually exists to fulfill a
shared social contract between the creator and
the audience. OK, I am going to need you to elaborate
on that. What kind of social contract are we
signing when we read a comic strip? Well, think
about the psychological difference between the
intent of a word and its visual offense. OK.
If a character in a comic strip hits their thumb
with a hammer, The creator is obligated to communicate
that this character is in sudden intense pain,
right? They're frustrated. Exactly. They're expressing
a very raw human emotion The writer needs to
show the intent of the profanity because that
intent is necessary for the story to work However,
depending on the publication standards, especially,
you know in a newspaper that sits on a family
breakfast table They simply cannot subject the
reader to the visual offense of printing the
actual vulgarity. So the publication is just
trying to maintain this facade of formal decency.
Precisely. And the Grawlix successfully threads
that needle perfectly. Because you get the emotion
without the bad word. Exactly. You, the reader,
get the raw emotion. You understand the context
perfectly. You even supply the vulgar word in
your own mind, just like you said. Right. But
because the publisher didn't actually print the
letters, they haven't crossed the boundary of
formal decency. It's this mutually agreed upon
fiction. We both know what the character said,
but we just agree to pretend that we didn't see
it. Exactly. It is essentially polite rage. Polite
rage. I like that. The publisher gets to keep
their hands clean, and the reader gets the emotional
payoff of the joke. But this visual trick relies
heavily on that shared understanding between
the artist and the reader. Right. It had to start
somewhere. Yeah, they had to agree on this visual
language at some point in history. And we actually
have a remarkably precise date for when that
visual language first appeared in print. Which
is pretty rare for linguistic stuff. It is. The
first known documented use of agraulics was published
on November 1st, 1901. 1901. Theodore Roosevelt
is in the White House. We are barely into the
20th century and someone is already inventing
typographic swearing. Yeah, it happened in a
comic strip called Lady Bountiful, which was
created by an artist named Jean Carr. Okay. And
the specific strip where this debuted was brilliantly
titled Lady Bountiful is Shocked. The details
of this first appearance from the source material
are just fantastic. They really are. The narrative
setup is super simple. Two children are arguing
with each other, and one of the kids has a speech
bubble that doesn't just contain standard keyboard
symbols. Right, it's not just hashtags and at
-signs. No, it starts with an exclamation point,
an asterisk, an exclamation point, a dash, an
exclamation point, another dash, and then it
just evolves beyond standard typography entirely.
The artist just moves away from the constraints
of a typewriter and starts utilizing the freedom
of ink. Jinkar actually drew... custom, completely
unpronounceable shapes. He drew a spiral with
line wrapped around it, and then a series of
jagged lines drawn around a dot. It's so visceral.
And then the character of Lady Bountiful reacts
by explicitly objecting to such language. It's
a fascinating choice. Oh, absolutely. I mean,
why not just use asterisks and dashes? Why go
through the trouble of drawing custom spirals
and dotted lines to convey this raw, unfiltered
emotion? That's the big question. Was this just
a pragmatic tool to get past a strict newspaper
editor, or was Carr stumbling onto a completely
new form of creative expression? If we connect
this to the bigger picture of early 20th century
media, it is definitively a new form of creative
expression. Really? Yeah. You have to put yourself
in the shoes of a cartoonist in 1901. They were
pioneering a brand new visual grammar for a medium
that was entirely static and entirely silent.
Ray, ink on paper has no volume. It has no audio
track. Exactly the challenge. They were trying
to draw the invisible. How do you visually represent
invisible concepts? Yeah, how do you show the
harsh, guttural, ugly tone of an angry voice
using only black ink? Right. And a spiral represents
winding up, like a tension that is about to snap.
Jagged lines around a dot feel like an explosion
of pressure. Oh, wow. The growlix was just this
brilliant innovative solution to represent the
ugly sharp texture of a curse word without writing
the word itself. And it clearly resonated with
audiences and other artists because the adoption
rate was incredibly fast. Super fast. The source
material notes that just over a year later on
December 12, 1902, The Cats and Jammer Kids,
which was a massively popular, highly influential
comic, became the second strip to adopt the style.
Which really cemented it. Yeah. From there, the
usage rapidly throughout 1902 and 1903. The visual
language was firmly established. The visual language
was established, yes, but the spoken language
had not caught up at all. What do you mean? Well,
they were drawing these complex spirals and symbol
clusters, but they didn't actually have a name
for what they were creating. It was just a nameless
tool. Okay, here's where it gets really interesting.
Oh, yeah. We have the visual invention clearly
documented in 1901, but the etymology -like where
the actual word growlix comes from is a total
historical hoodunit that spanned decades. Let's
look at the sound of the word itself first. Okay.
Merriam -Webster suggests that growlix might
originate from the root word growl. That makes
perfect intuitive sense. It does, right? A growl
is the guttural, angry, primitive sound a person
or an animal makes when they are upset or threatened.
Yeah, the word growlix mimics that hard aggressive
growl sound right at the front of the throat.
Exactly. It practically sounds like a curse word
itself. It really does. But who actually coined
it? Because for over half a century, the creation
of the word growlix was universally attributed
to Mort Walker. And Mort Walker is an absolute
titan in the American cartooning world. He is
most famous for creating the long running comic
strip Beetle Bailey. Right. And in 1964, Morat
Walker wrote an article titled, Let's Get Down
to Grolixes, where he really popularized the
term. He put it on the map. He did. And later
on, he expanded on this entire concept in a very
famous book called The Lexicon of Comicana, which
is a great book. In that book, Walker essentially
created a comprehensive dictionary for all the
visual shorthand used in the comic industry.
Right, he categorized everything. He gave names
to the little sweat drops that fly off a nervous
character's head, the little dust clouds that
appear when someone runs away fast, and of course
the string of symbols used for swearing. And
because he wrote the definitive dictionary...
Everyone just accepted that Mort Walker invented
the word. Right. We accepted it until a highly
respected comic scholar named Maggie Thompson
started digging into the archives. Yeah, this
is where the twist happens. In 2013, Maggie Thompson
makes a massive discovery. She finds concrete
proof that Mort Walker did not invent the word
Grawlix. Right. She traced the term back to a
writer named Charles D. Rice. Charles D. Rice.
Yeah. Rice was a writer for a magazine called
This Week. And he had written an article that
was later reprinted in a 1954 book titled, What's
Funny About That? In that text, Charles D. Rice
explicitly uses the term Grawlix. This places
the invention of the word a full decade before
Mort Walker's famous 1964 article. So Charles
D. Rice is the true father of the Grawlix. He
is. But the ultimate irony of this whole historical
mix -up is that Mort Walker, the man who received
all the unearned credit, actually tried to set
the record straight himself. He really did. In
his 1975 book Backstage at the Strips, Walker
explicitly credited Charlie Rice of This Week
magazine for inventing the term. He literally
cited his source. He attempted to pass the credit
back to the rightful owner. But the entire comics
community, including scholars like Maggie Thompson,
who eventually uncovered the truth decades later,
read Walker's 1975 citation and completely dismissed
it. They thought it was a bit. Yes. They assumed
Walker was just making a joke. They thought Charlie
Rice was a fake imaginary scholarly attribution
that Walker invented just to sound absurdly academic.
It is an astonishing game of academic telephone.
The absolute truth was printed in plain sight
and everyone just chose to ignore it. I mean
why are we so incredibly quick to assign credit
to a famous popularizer instead of trusting the
actual inventor? even when the popularizer is
waving his hands and pointing directly at the
real creator. Well, this highlights a fascinating
flaw in how history, authority, and information
are recorded. How so? Mort Walker possessed a
massive, highly visible platform. He was famous,
and more importantly, he authored the authoritative
textbook on comic terminology. Right. When you
write the dictionary, you inherently become the
default authority. The gravity of his platform
just completely warped the historical record.
Exactly. The popularizer often eclipses the creator
in our historical memory because the public narrative
strongly prefers the simpler story. Yeah, the
narrative that the famous cartoonist who wrote
the book also invented the word. It's neat and
tidy. Exactly. And the context of the medium
also plays a crucial role here. Comic strips
were viewed as a funny, unserious medium. Oh,
so they expected a joke. Right. Scholars and
readers were conditioned to expect a punchline.
So when they encountered a completely factual,
dry citation of a mid -century magazine writer,
they misread reality as a joke. It is. A tragic
loss of legacy for Charles G. Rice, honestly,
but it provides a brilliant window into the mechanics
of history. It really does. So we have journeyed
from the static, silent ink of a 1901 newspaper
to the murky waters of mid -century academic
citations. But the Gralics didn't stay trapped
in vintage newspaper comics. No. It evolved.
It didn't fade away into obscurity when comic
strips started to lose their cultural dominance.
Instead, it managed to completely conquer modern
digital communication. The concept of the Graalux
has transitioned so seamlessly into the digital
age that it's now literally coded into the foundational
software of our devices. It's everywhere. It
isn't just a quirky habit of people typing random
symbols on their keyboards anymore. The Graalux
has been formally standardized by the consortiums
that control our digital language. Right, because
in 2016, a formal proposal was submitted for
a brand new emoji. The official technical designation
in the code is EmojiU plus 1F92C, and the literal
description attached to that code is, serious
face with symbols covering mouth. which loops
us perfectly back to Gene Carr's 1901 comic.
It really does. It is the exact visual intent
of anger masked by unpronounceable symbols. And
in 2017, that proposal was officially accepted
into Unicode 10 .0. Every smartphone on the planet
now carries that little red angry face with the
at hash dollar percent ampersand banner covering
its mouth. It's universal now. But the technological
adoption is only half the story. The formal,
incredibly rigid world of institutional dictionaries
has finally capitulated to the Graalics as well.
The timeline of its acceptance into formal English
has accelerated remarkably. It really has. In
June of 2018, the prestigious Merriam -Webster
Dictionary officially added the word Graalics
to their lexicon. Then in November 2022, it crossed
over into interactive pop culture. Merriam -Webster
and Hasbro teamed up to release the seventh edition
of the official Scrabble Players Dictionary.
A huge milestone. Yeah, sitting right there among
the sanctioned words you can legally play for
points on a board is Grawlix. And the explicit
reason the publisher cited for adding it? Familiarity
among younger players. That specific demographic
detail is crucial. It is. Bringing us right up
to the present moment. Literally this very month,
March 2025, the heavyweight champion of the English
language, the Oxford English Dictionary, has
officially added the word Grawlix to its ranks.
Wow. So what does this all mean? We are staring
at a wild linguistic paradox here. What do you
mean? Well, a growlix, by definition, is supposed
to be a cluster of meaningless, unpronounceable
symbols that stand in for a word you aren't allowed
to say. Right. But now that growlix is a valid
high -scoring Scrabble word and an official OED
entry, hasn't it stopped being just a symbol
for a word and actually morphed into a real functional
word itself? This raises such an important question
about the life cycle of language and how we define
words. You were pointing at a beautiful irony.
It's so strange to think about. You can now sit
down at a Scrabble board, place the tiles G -R
-A -W -L -I -X down on the grid, and score points
using the exact alphabetic letters that the concept
was originally invented to hide. It is highly
meta. You are literally spelling a word that
describes the absence of spelling. Exactly. But
the most striking part of the Scrabble edition
is that it was driven by younger players. Yeah,
the teenagers. You have teenagers and young adults
in the 2020s who are keeping a visual trick invented
in a 1901 newspaper comic strip alive. It's amazing.
Not only are they keeping it alive, they're pushing
it into formal, institutional dictionaries through
sheer usage. They forced it into the dictionary.
Yes. And the emoji we discussed, that serious
face with symbols over the mouth, acts as the
perfect bridge. How so? It connects the original
1901 visual gag of drawing obscure shapes over
a character's mouth directly with 21st century
rapid -fire text messaging. It proves that the
fundamental human need to express polite anger
hasn't changed in over a century. Only the medium
has evolved. So the next time you're fuming and
you rapid fire a string of shift key symbols
into a group chat or you carefully select that
little red swearing face emoji, I want you to
remember this journey. It's not just random.
No. You aren't just mashing your keyboard in
a blind rage. You are actively participating
in a rich 120 -year -old tradition of polite
rage. A very distinguished tradition. You are
utilizing the exact same visual grammar that
Jean Carr used in 1901 to keep Lady Bountiful
from fainting at the breakfast table. Which is
pretty cool to think about. It's an absolute
testament to how human creativity will always
find a clever, expressive workaround for society's
strict social constraints. You find a way? We
can't print the actual words, so we're just gonna
draw a tension spiral and a hashtag, and we trust
that you're gonna know exactly what we mean.
It is a perfect synthesis of constraint breeding
creativity. But as we think about where human
communication goes next, there is a lingering,
somewhat unpredictable frontier that the growlix
is going to have to navigate very soon. Oh, I
am intrigued. What is the next frontier for typographic
swearing? Consider the rapid rise of accessibility
tools and artificial intelligence. We're moving
deeply into an era where AI and text -to -speech
programs are increasingly reading our digital
text out loud to us. Oh, right, like screen readers.
Exactly. We use screen readers for the visually
impaired, and we use virtual assistants that
read our text messages to us over our car speakers
while we drive. So how will future technologies
actually pronounce agrolyx? Oh, wow. If the entire
point of the growlix is that it is unpronounceable,
what does a machine do when forced to speak it?
Exactly. When an AI assistant encounters an at
sign, a hashtag, a dollar sign, a percent, and
an ampersand in the middle of an angry text thread,
how does it process that social contract? That's
a great question. Do the software engineers program
it to revert back to a literal auditory TV bleep?
Maybe. Or does the machine fail to grasp the
context and just robotically read at sign, hash,
dollar percent which would ruin the emotion entirely
it would or are we going to have to invent a
completely new universally recognized spoken
sound just for typographical anger. That is wild.
We spent 120 years perfecting a way to make swearing
silent and highly visual, and now the robots
are going to force us to figure out what an angry
hashtag actually sounds like when spoken out
loud. It's the next great linguistic challenge.
Well, the next time you are furiously mashing
that shift number row, just imagine how your
smartphone's AI is going to try and scream those
symbols back to you. Thanks for joining us on
this deep dive. We will catch you next time.