On the track of the squean
Until yesterday, one item from the
Zits
list
of activities unsuitable
at a school dance had still not been tracked down anywhere:
squeaning. Then Keith Handley found the squean on
a fonts website,
where a comic-book style font (called MarkerMan) is being distributed
that
Includes 5 useful cartoon symbols,
leaned from Mort Walker's Lexicon of
Comicana and ABC Etcetera:
The Life & Times of the Roman Alphabet by A. & N. Humez.
From left to right of the bottom row above: the squean (which might float around a
drunken character's head)...
The squean is an asterisk with an empty center.
("Leaned from" puzzles me. "Learned from"? "Loaned
from"? "Gleaned from"? Or what?)
There's also the
phosphene,
for a character who's "seeing stars", and three substitutes for
swearing -- the
grawlix, the
jarn, and the
quimp -- which can be used on their
own or combined with one another and with standard symbols like
@#$%*. (The grawlix, a spiral, figures prominently in a "Mother
Goose & Grimm" comic strip that Ben Zimmer
posted
about a while back: "Grimm just said the {grawlix}-word.")
The labels are presumably inventions of Walker's. The Amazon
book
description tells us:
Written as a satire on the comic
devices cartoonists use, the book quickly became a textbook for art
students. Walker researched cartoons around the world to collect this
international set of cartoon symbols. The names he invented for them
now appear in dictionaries.
[Addendum: Dick Margulis writes to say that phosphenes are the "stars" you see when you close your eyes and press against the lids, and the OED pretty much agrees with this. So this one isn't an invention.]
Handley speculates that the
Zits
cartoonists borrowed the comics term to fill out their list of teen
activities. He also wonders if
knurling
(also on the list) might be used by cartoonists to refer to a kind of
cross-hatching. I'm on the case.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at December 20, 2006 12:29 PM