What the $%&*# is a grawlix?

This newsletter is rated PG-13.

If you’re old enough to remember when movies aired on actual TV networks — not streaming, no, get off my lawn — then you’ll probably enjoy this one.

Once upon a time, after a movie had a run in theaters and then showed up at Blockbuster, and once it was long gone from the New Release shelf there and no one cared any longer if you were kind enough to rewind, and then after it hit premium cable like The Channel Formerly Known as HBO, it would air on regular old TV. For free. But it often came with a cost nonetheless: The edited-out swear words.

Did you also think, for years, that Cameron yelled “Pardon my French, you’re an aardvark!” over the phone in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? Or that Samantha in Sixteen Candles was upset because “They fluffing forgot my birthday!”?

You get the idea. Now, if you read the comics in the Sunday newspaper that is almost certainly no longer an actual paper anymore, they had a different way of conveying swears. Less funny, perhaps, than calling someone an aardvark, but more effective than dubbing over words.

The grawlix.

The what now?

That’s what I said when my friend Kristen, alert reader that she is, sent me the Merriam-Webster word of the day recently.

A grawlix, it said, is “a series of typographical symbols used in text as a replacement for profanity.”

The term grawlix was, in fact, coined by a cartooonist. Mort Walker, who wrote Beetle Bailey, introduced the term in a 1964 article for The National Cartoonist Society, per this Slate piece. Rudolph Dirks, author of the comic strip The Katzenjammer Kids, was using strings of symbols to stand in for swears as far back as 1902.

And now you know!

So, most of you have probably noticed the significant gap in time since my last column. If you’ve read this far, thank you, I’m glad to be back. Life got a little complicated the last few months, but I really want to make The Standards Department happen. I appreciate your readership.