Being a big fan of the comic strips featured in this newspaper (especially the colorful Sunday ones), I’d like to take a look at the names of some of the devices cartoonists routinely employ — namely sounds (onomatopoeia) and symbols (called symbolia). 

“Boom!” “Pow!” “Swish,” “Gulp,” “Meow.” Onomatopoeia (“the naming of a thing or action by a vocal imitation of the sound associated with it,” according to Merriam-Webster) is everywhere. “In fact,” it continues, “the presence of so many imitative words in language spawned the linguistic bowwow theory, which postulates that language originated in the imitating of natural sounds.”

While the bowwow theory has no shortage of detractors, one thing is certain: Onomatopoeia (also known as American Visual language) is alive and well in comic books and comic strips.

In his article Four-Color Sound: A Peircean Semiotics of Comic Book Onomatopoeia (Public Journal of Semiotics 6), Sean A. Guynes notes that “Onomatopoeia (first) became popular with Roy Crane’s comic strip “Wash Tubbs” of the 1920s . . . (making) use of onomatopoeic sound effects” such as “bam,” “pow” and “wham.”

Over the course of the ensuing century onomatopoeia has become commonplace in everything from superhero comics to the one featuring everybody’s favorite antihero Beetle Bailey.

In general, mainstream comics make use of two types of onomatopoeic expressions. There are vocalizations, such as grunts and laughs, which appear in speech balloons and thought bubbles, and there are what comic writers call sound effects — words that convey explosions, punches, or other sounds not made by beings (human and otherwise) or animals.

If all those sounds are just so much noise to you then how about using symbols instead? The person most commonly associated with what he called symbolia is Beetle Bailey creator Addison Morton “Mort” Walker, who died in 2018.

In his 1980 book “Lexicon of Comicana,” Walker elaborates on not only many of the symbols he’s created but also on the neologisms he came up with for them as well. Squeans, or starbursts, and little circles above a character’s head show that they’re intoxicated, dizzy or otherwise unwell. Lines drawn around a character’s head to show surprise are called emanate.

Walker also created plewds, those flying sweat droplets that appear around a character’s head to indicate they’re working hard or stressed. And there are indotherms, those wavy, rising lines that are used to represent steam or heat. (When the same shape is used to represent a smell, it is called a wafteron.)

Without a doubt, Mort Walker’s most famous symbol has to be the one for swearing, which he called “grawlix,” usually represented with something like @#$%&!. It serves as a stand-in for a character’s foul language and evidently always has to end with an exclamation point.

He also came up with three other sets of symbols and squiggles representing graphic euphemisms that he called quimps, jarns and nittles and are difficult to distinguish from grawlixes.

In a recent Beetle Bailey comic strip, General Halftrack and his buddies are raucously watching a basketball game on TV when his wife tells them to watch their language because there’s a lady present. As she’s walking away, she says, “That should shut their @^#*!! mouths!” Her grawlix got two exclamation points!

Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.” He can be reached at [email protected].