629: Grawlix Aug 28, 2016

Have you ever wondered what the f@*k those symbols used to mask curse-words are? Much like the bleep that is used to hide words that are spoken but found to be in some way offensive in their own right, people use symbols that would be able to be easily typed, but wouldn't have to be the standard spelling. The first uses of this were in comics in the early 1900's. There is no purposeful reason that people use the type of symbols they do, or why people often could fill 'shit' as 's&*t' or 's@^t' with no standard, but the characters themselves were chosen by default because typewriters do not have that many options for characters that aren't letters or common punctuation. The name for these sorts of symbols is 'grawlix' coined by Mort Walker in his 1980 book, The Lexicon of Comicana.