Grawlixes/Obscenicons – Unutterable Graphics and the Universal Interjection!

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Literary & Linguistics, Media & Communications, Popular Culture

Grawlixes or Obscenicons

Grawlix: a spiral-shaped graphic used to indicate swearing in comic strips (comprising typographical symbols, non-letter graphic characters which are encased in a word-free balloon)

~ Wiktionary, http://wiktionary.org

Etymology of the Grawlix
The term Grawlix itself comes from veteran American cartoonist Addison Morton Walker. The sprightly nonagenarian better known to the world as Mort Walker has gleaned lifelong fame in the US (and elsewhere where his comics are treasured) from two of his creations, Beetle Bailey and a spin-off of sorts, Hi and Lois. Beetle Bailey is especially beloved of seriously rusted-on US comic aficionados. Beetle, a private (zero-class!) in an unnamed US Army military post, has been described as “a feckless, shirking, perpetual goof-off and straggler known for his chronic laziness and generally insubordinate attitude”. Debuting in September 1950 Beetle Bailey is among the oldest comic strips still being produced by the original creator [‘Beetle Bailey’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

Copycat grawlixing!

Walker apparently coined the term ‘grawlix’ around 1964…it appears in a tongue-in-cheek article he penned called “Let’s Get Down to Grawlixes”. A nonsense word, grawlix is the descriptor that Walker came up with to depict a cartoonist’s standard device: to show that one of his or her’s characters was uttering a “four-letter” word or words in the strip without infringing any moral codes, the cartoonist would draw a combination of typographical symbols and insert them in the dialogue balloon in place of the actual profane words. Commonly but not uniformly, the symbols used are @#$%&! or slight variations on this (whichever typographics are used, the grawlix always ends with an exclamation mark [Nordquist]). And as a way of expressing powerful, earthy emotions without having to call in the censors, it caught on within the realm of popular graphic art!”❉

Mort Walker’s catalogue of neologisms
In his Lexicon of Comicana (1980) Walker in his jocular fashion elaborates on his personal vocabulary of neologisms from the world of the cartoonist (with mock grandness he called these his Symbolia)…so in addition to grawlix the Lexicon contains many of Walker’s trademark neologisms, words coined for his own amusement, some with strange-sounding onomatopoeic names – a few of which are listed below.

In addition to grawlix, Walker devised and named three other sets of symbols and squiggles representing graphic euphemisms for the unspeakable and very taboo swear words – Quimps, Jarns and Nittles (basically hard to distinguish from grawlixes but something very similar by another name!) [World Wide Words].

Moving away the topic of obscenities Mort came up with other words to describe some of the graphics representing the range of feelings and emotions experienced by his comic personae – such as squean – squeans are starbursts and little circles above the character’s head to indicate a state of intoxication, dizziness or unwellness¤.

Other logo-inventions in the idiosyncratic Walker Lexicon are variations on the same theme – such as:
Emanate – lines drawn around the head to show shock or surprise
Plewds – flying sweat droplets that appear around a character’s head to indicate working hard, stressed, etc.

An indotherm – as opposed to a wafteron!

Another neologism in Walker’s ‘cartoonucopia’ is Indotherm – wavy, rising lines used to represent steam or heat; when the same shape is used to denote smell, it is called a wafteron.

Before the grawlix was the unnamed ‘grawlix’
Mort Walker gave the world a recognisable name to identify what is today a standard cartoonist’s device for representing profanity in a non-verbal way, but the use of @#$%&! wrapped in a speech bubble far predates modern comic strip practitioners like Walker. Ben Zimmer has researched early US comic strip history to find that the device features in comics goes as far back as 1902 – the work of Rudolph Dirks employed the grawlix in his strip (he just didn’t it that, or anything!). In Dirk”s “Katzenjammer Kids” for the New York Journal… the pioneering cartoonist “initiat(ed) the use of both speech balloons and…symbolic swearing”. This was emulated by a contemporary cartoonist of Dirks, Gene Carr, at about the same time (1903). Zimmer himself eschews the random ‘Grawlix’, preferring the term Obscenicon💢[Zimmer].

Grawlixes and other such graphic devices are the indispensable tools of cartoonists and comic artists looking for a way to economise with words and convey an emotion succinctly. They are non-verbal and thus all about visual cues…they can convey obscenities without recourse to the offending words themselves, or they can summarise an action or reaction instantly with an image that obviates the need for words and a lengthy explanatory sentence.

❆∺❆∺❆∺❆∺❆∺❆ ❆∺❆∺❆∺❆∺❆∺❆ ❆∺❆

Interjections

Interjection: is a part of speech using words solely designed to convey (often strong) emotions (reinforcing meaning or feeling). It conveys the emotion, sentiment or feelings of its speaker [‘What is An Interjection?’, (Your Dictionary), www.grammar.yourdictionary.com].

Another way of characterising the interjection is through its syntactic position. It is “an exclamation inserted into an utterance without grammatical connection to it” [ibid.]. Interjections are the tools of casual or creative communication, they have an informality to them, and in many cases an outright ‘slanginess’ to them (eg, ‘Jeez’, ‘Holy cow!’ (or ‘mackerel’), ‘Fiddlesticks!’, ‘Baloney!’, ‘Bingo!’, ‘Mama-Mia!’).

All contemporary engagers in social media are (over)familiar with exclamations like ‘LOL’ and ‘OMG’ (case optional) or ‘Ha-ha’ which infest the online world of communications like locusts at harvest season⊛. Interjections are exhaustive in number and heterogeneous in nature. They can be used to communicate a broad spectrum of different feelings – from anger and frustration (Argh) to sadness or sentimentality (Aw) to confusion (Huh!) to disgust (Yuck!) to mockery (Whoop-de-doo⊡) to indifference (Meh) to surprise (Wow!) to excitement (Woo-hoo!) to triumph (Yay!) not to be confused with the affirmative ‘Yea!’ [Fleming].

Interjections are usually positioned at the start of the sentence, occasionally at the end (the purpose being to maximise the message’s impact or effect). And like the sound themselves, most interjections can be strengthened by elongating them [Vidarholen] – adding one or more extra w’s to Aw gives weight to the degree of empathy you want to convey to your interlocutor; similarly using more than one Ha-ha is interjector code for turning up the laughter gauge! Putting an exclamation mark after the interjection is not mandatory but is often employed in the spirit of the lack of restraint that characterises this part of speech. After all, interjections are at their core exclamations – the appended ! goes with the territory!(Image credit: www.7esl.com)

PostScript 1: “Onomatopoeic interjections”
Onomatopoeic words or phrases are ones that imitate the sound of a thing or action, splash! is therefore onomatopoeic, it is also an interjection. Interjections represent emotion and can usually be distinguished from onomatopoeia which represents sounds, although there is clearly some overlap between the two. Another point of difference is that an interjection is syntactically isolated, it has no grammatical connection with the rest of the sentence⌽.

PostScript 2: Batman – Holy interjections with graphics!
The cult 1960s television series Batman is a veritable feast of interjections…in just about every episode Boy Wonder Robin, with excruciating monotony, specialises in uttering interjections of the “Holy ……” kind. Robin would pick the opportune moment to breathlessly interject with “Holy Switch-a-Roo”, “Holy Superlatives”, “Holy Cliche” or whatever other topical word pertaining to the “Dynamic Duo’s” particular predicament de jour [Oxford Dictionaries Blog].

The sublimely ridiculous Bat Fight scenes in the TV show are replete with interjections…as Batman and the arch-villains land thunderous blows on each other, corny graphics flash up with words representing the pugilistic action (SOCK! AIMEE! BIFF! WHAMM! KAPOW! THUNK! BANG!). Interestingly Batman’s art department incorporated some comic strip style graphics into the flashing word cards (eg, stars within the word SOCK! signifying the effects of being ‘socked’, ie, dazed, dizzy – akin to a kind of squean? KAPOW! with a bulls-eye target inside the O)

←←←←←←←←←←←←←←←←←←→→

❉ placed in dialogue boxes above the characters’ heads (Walker calls these “Maledicta balloons”)
¤ a character with both a squean and a spurl (a vertical upward-spiralling coil) above his or her head is more than a little drunk, they’ve had a ‘skinful’ in fact! [Brownlee]
⊛ its unquantifiable definitively, but an empirical survey of the various avenues of social media would confirm an upsurge in interjection usage in everyday communications
💢 Urban Dictionary describes ‘oscenicons’ as “like a emoticon, but for profane words”
⊡ especially mocking someone who is trying to impress
⌽ the Onomatopoeia Dictionary lists a number of words that can represent both forms of expression, eg, wham, phew, shoo, shush, ha-ha, geez

╰☆╮ ╰☆╮ ╰☆╮

References:
J Brownlee, ‘Quimps, Plewds, And Grawlixes: The Secret Language Of Comic Strips’, (Co. Design), 15-Jul-2013, www.fastcodesign.com
Grace Fleming, ‘Interjections’, Thought Co, 23-Apr-2015, www.thoughtco.com
Richard Nordquist, ‘What the @#$%&! Is a Grawlix?’ (Thought Co), 02-May-2017, www.thoughtco.com
B Zimmer, ‘How did @#$%&! come to represent profanity?’, Slate, 09-Oct-2013, www.slate.com
‘Grawlixes’, (World Wide Words), www.worldwidewords.org
The lexicon of comicana’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org
‘Dictionary of Interjections’, www.vidarholen.net
‘From “Gadzooks” to “Cowabunga”: some episodes in the life of the interjection’, Oxford Dictionaries, www.blog.oxforddictionaries.com
Onomatopoeia Dictionary A-Z, (Written Sound), www.writtensound.com
﹍﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹍﹍﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹍﹍﹎﹎﹎﹎

A 1960s Juvenile Reader: Classic British Comic Strips and ‘Just William’

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Literary & Linguistics, Media & Communications, Memorabilia, Popular Culture

As a counterweight to the surfeit of 1960s American television that comprised a large slice of my diet of home entertainment, my juvenile literary tastes back then were decidedly more Anglophile. Plunging into the graphic art world of the 1960s comic book I digested everything I came across catering for adrenalin-pumping, red-blooded British boys.

Desperate Dan, ‘The Dandy’

Among these beacons of popular culture were The Beano (which starred Dennis the Menace and Gnasher), The Dandy❈ (featuring Korky the Cat and Desperate Dan), Knockout (Billy Bunter), The Hotspur, The Rover (these two papers were prime examples of the “Boys’ Own Adventure” style of stories) and Eagle with its centrepiece inter-galactic hero ‘Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future’, not to forget Tiger which catered for British schoolboy football mania with the stellar-booted striker ‘Roy of the Rovers’. The individual comics were grouse fun but what I most enjoyed was the comic book annuals of The Beano, etc., where I could indulge myself in reading a whole end-of-year book comprising a cross-section of the comic’s different strips⚀.

At primary school in the sixties the punitive powers-that-be weren’t all that rapt in comic books as reading material…my confiscated copy of ‘Dennis the Menace Bumper Comic’ (before I had a chance to read hardly any of it!) bore witness to that. From what was on offer in the school library, the one children’s book I did take a shine to was Just William, I should say series of books because there 38 (some sources say 39) ‘William’ books in all! All of the books were collections of short stories, with the exception of one in novel form.

Author Richmal Crompton

Just William was the creation of female English author Richmal Crompton (Lamburn). As a child feverishly devouring all the William books I shared with the overwhelming bulk of readers the uncritical assumption that Richmal was a man. How wrong were we all!!! Miss Lamburn was a school mistress (ironically – in an all-girls school!) who contracted polio and spent the rest of her life writing the William series of books as well as 41 adult novels❦.

The character of William (surname: Brown) was apparently based on Richmal’s young nephew Tommy…in the books William is scruffy and untidy in appearance, and given to directness, rebellion and straight talking – which sometimes lands him in strife. He is the leader of his own small gang of school friends who go by the name of “The Outlaws” (comprising his best friend Ginger as well as two other boys, Henry and Douglas). William is 11, an age he stays at, despite the series of books stretching over a period of nearly 50 years! [‘Just William’, Wikipedia entry]

‘William the Dictator’ (1938)

Most of the books follow the ordinary run of events of William and the Outlaws entangling themselves in minor mischiefs, usually involving nothing worse than the ill-conceived idea of painting a terrier blue! But occasionally William strayed into more edgy and outright polemical territory. In the short story ‘William and the Nasties’¤ William’s band emulate Hitler and his fellow National Socialists in order to terrorise a local Jewish sweet-shop owner (featuring in the 1935 collection William the Detective [‘Five Fascinating Facts about Just William’, www.interestingliterature.com].

Just William’s topicality
A good number of the Just William books regularly reflected current events of their day. William the Conqueror (published in 1926) was resonant of European colonial power imperialism leading up to WWI. William The Dictator (1938) reflected the world’s concern with fascism and National Socialism. Similarly, William and the Evacuees (appearing in 1940) was set against the backdrop of WWII. In the post-war period, the superpowers’ preoccupation with the space race inspired new books like William and the Moon Rocket (1954) and William and the Space Animal (1956) [‘Just William’, Wikipedia entry].

Just William book spin-offs
With such popularity that the Just William books attained (12 million sales in the UK alone), they inevitably flowed through to adaptation to other forms – cinema (three films in the 1940s), two television series (one in the mid-1950s and the other in the early 1960s), radio and even theatre. As well, the schoolboy hero spawned a host of Just William merchandise…from jigsaws and board games to cigarette cards, magic painting books and figurines of William [‘Richmal Crompton’s Just William Society’, www.justwilliam.co.uk]

Celebrity fandom: Lennon as William
Some time after the Beatles visited Australasia in 1964 at the height of “Mop-top mania”, I remember hearing that John Lennon had been a fan of the fictional William in his boyhood. Lennon’s devotion to the books prompted him to form his own, real-life version of the Outlaws, moulding his friends Ivy, Nigel and Pete into a Liverpudlian boy foursome. With John of course as leader, the boys engaged in “small acts of defiance and daring” on their local turf [J Edmondson, John Lennon: A Biography (2010)]. The revelation that I had been propelled into the stratospheric company of such a youth icon as Beatle John, only served to magnify my primary school days zeal for all things William Brown!

PostScript: Continental comic book legends
My childhood taste in comics were not exclusively confined to the gold standard of British comics. Like millions of other children I was also captivated by those ancient Gallic tormentors of Roman legionnaires, Asterix and Obelix (Astérix le Gaulois by Goscinny and Uderzo). In equal measure I was in the thrall of Tintin, Hergé’s creation of a globe-roaming Belgian boy-reporter. Each comic album of The Adventures of Tintin was a lesson in political geography embroiling Tintin in high-stakes adventures in a new and exotic land. But as rewarding as the respective adventures of Asterix and Tintin were, in my book nothing quite scaled the same exalted heights of anticipation as did the prospect of dipping into the treasure trove of Just William’s world.

╼╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼╼╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼ ╾╼╾
❈ The originals The Beano and The Dandy were of course far superior to the highly derivative and latter imitations like The Topper and Beezer and Cor!!
⚀ not to be overshadowed, schoolgirls had their own comics and annuals such as Bunty and School Friend Annual
❦ the most accomplished of which was Leadon Hill. The tone of the adult novels was more pessimistic than the Just William series, dealing with themes of divorce and infidelity [Danuta Keen, ‘Not Just William: Richmal Crompton’s adult fiction republished’, The Guardian, 21-Apr-2017]
¤ the name ‘Nasties’ is the result of William’s mishearing of the word ‘Nazis’

Launder and Gilliat: Prolific and Tradesman-like Collaborators of British Cinema

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Biographical, Cinema, Creative Writing, Literary & Linguistics

Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat were two English film-makers who maintained a steadily consistent presence in the British cinema between the 1930s and the 1970s. Launder and Gilliat’s creative contribution to films, whether as writers, directors or producers (or as all three), contributed to over 100 British films in that era, including nearly 40 together as co-writers and producers.

The two co-wrote The Lady Vanishes, a 1938 mystery which was a breakthrough feature for Alfred Hitchcock❈. Interestingly both Launder and Gilliat (hereafter L & G) had their (separate) starts in the film business composing inter-titles (title cards) for silent movies in the late 1920s, the same industry beginnings undertaken by Hitchcock several years earlier. L & G combined their talents behind-the-camera together for the first time from the mid 1930s. The L & G partnership had a flexibility and a particular pattern to it … invariably they would jointly produce films and/or also co-write screenplays (although on other occasions either man would co-write films with various other collaborating screenwriters). But almost with very few exceptions one or the other would direct a specific film singly – this was done apparently to avoid confusing the actors[1].

A versatile¤ and fecund partnership
As well as being prolific contributors to the creation of British films for such a long period, L & G’s film output spanned a range of genres … from thrillers and ‘whodunits’ like Green for Danger (1956) and Secret State (1950) to WWII social-realism films such as Waterloo Road (1944) and Millions Like Us (1943) to romance/adventures like The Blue Lamp (1949) to historical dramas such as Captain Boycott (1947) to farces like The Green Man (1956) and light comedies such as The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950), a precursor to a popular series of movies set in a girls’ boarding school immobilised by riotous juvenile anarchy – starting with The Belles of St Trinian’s (1954) which spawned a string of increasingly predictable sequels.

“Journeymen auteurs?”
The Times of London described the Gilliat/Launder team as “one of the most sparkling writing, directing and producing partnerships in postwar British cinema”[2]. Notwithstanding such praise, L & G’s body of work has tended to be undervalued by the bulk of film critics … at times eliciting back-handed appraisals from critics such as “toilers in the British comic tradition”; (their films at best exhibiting) “unfailing good humour and the occasional brainy prankishness”[3]. Certainly, technical innovation and self-conscious artiness was not Gilliat and Launder’s style, but they never managed to garner anything remotely like the prestige or critical approval that was lavished on other contemporary British film-makers, eg, Powell and Pressburger, Carol Reed or the Boulting brothers. Bruce Babington has attributed this in part to L & G’s ‘reticence’ as film-makers, the way that they declined to project themselves forward and intervene in controversies and debates of the day, unlike say, their contemporaries the Boultings[4].

Enlistment in the production of propaganda vehicles
So closely did the personal film-making styles and interests of the two collaborators align, many people found it hard to distinguish between a Launder-directed picture and one directed by Gilliat … most L & G films tended to resemble the fruits of their combined efforts. Or as Adair and Roddick put it, “it would take a lynx-eyed buff to be able to distinguish one from the other”[5].

The war-time pictures, Millions Like Us and Two Thousand Women can be identified as reflecting in particular Frank Launder’s preoccupation with the portrayal of strong, defiantly independent women[6]. These films were commissioned by the UK Ministry of Information to counter the prevailing low recruitment and morale of women in war-time factory work. Millions Like Us, as Judy Suh has noted, conveyed the “double valence of women as productive workers and domestic symbols of national unity”. L & G’s social-realist films, though propagandist in purpose, posed questions of gender and class whilst depicting the routine of ordinary people at work. The necessities of war-time brought out the conflicting roles and identities of women in such an out-of-the ordinary circumstance, as well as the existence of crossings of class boundaries[7].

St Trini’s girls with their jolly hockey sticks (Ronald Searle cartoon, 1954)

After the war, witty and farcical comedies (albeit slight), were their forte (with the occasional thriller thrown in). Like other high-profile international film-makers L & G had their favourite performers that they liked to work with. L & G got the best performances out of British actors like Alastair Sim, Margaret Rutherford, Joyce Grenfell, Rex Harrison and George Cole. Of these luminaries it was Alastair Sim whose star shined most brightly under the direction of L & G. Sim appeared in at least ten L & G movies and his deliciously roguish star turns as a middle class word-spinning con-man were pure gold. George Cole, who also had a regular gig in the St Trinian’s cycle as the ultra dodgy spiv Flash Harry◘, described working with Gilliat and Launder (and Sim) … to Cole (later himself to find TV fame as consummate, malapropistic con-man ‘Arfur’ Daley in Minder) their films meant:

“Good scripts but terrible money. If Alastair was in the film it was even worse because he got most of it. But they were wonderful people to work with”[8].

‘Pure Hell of St Trinians’ (1960)

In the 1940s Launder and Gilliat formed their own production company, aptly named Individual Pictures, at this time they were contractually engaged by Gainsborough Pictures … in 1958 the partners took charge of the production side of the struggling independent studio British Lion. By the 1960s both the quality and quantity of Gilliat/Launder productions had receded. In 1980 Launder went once more to the St Trinian’s well❃ with yet another sequel, Wildcats of St Trinian’s … unwisely so as the novelty of L & G’s feature films based on Ronald Searle’s charming cartoons of feral schoolgirls had long since lost their appeal.

PostScript: The Charters and Caldicott characters trope – antiquated, old school Englishness
L & G wrote into The Lady Vanishes two minor characters that were to become iconic, background characters in British cinema. Played by actors Basil Radford and Naughton Wayne, the two incidental supporting figures are singleminded cricket enthusiasts—or “cricket tragics” as one recent Australian PM was dubbed—trying to hurry back to England to see the last days of the Manchester test match. The popularity of the characters saw them reappear in other L & G movies (including Night Train to Munich, Millions Like Us and in the 1979 remake of The Lady Vanishes), and in several other non-L & G films, eg, the Boxs’ A Girl in a Million and (appropriately enough) It’s Not Cricket. Charters and Caldicott were also reprised for several radio series, and for a 1985 television series. Charters and Caldicott’s fame also extended to their inclusion in a series of Carreras Cigarette cards in the 1950s.

⏏︎ Charters & Caldicott

The starkly gormless personalities of Charters and Caldicott, a couple of blithering “Colonel Blimpish” snobs, was a comical throwback to a past England with ‘proper’ gentlemanly good manners and standards of dress[9]. Matthew Sweet saw the two blunderers (in their 1938 incarnations against a backdrop of appeasement) as symbols of “a peculiarly British obstinacy in the face of Nazi aggression” in Europe[10]. Their apathetic dispositions and complete lack of perspicacity about the momentous events happening around them also puts one in mind of Tom Stoppard’s two artless and aimless courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern roaming through Elsinore, ‘Everyman’ figures in the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, but even more prosaic!

The L & G team

❈ The Lady Vanishes helped open Hollywood doors for Hitchcock … after ‘Hitch’ completed Jamaica Inn in 1939 (written by Gilliat et al) he set sail for America (for good), inviting Gilliat to join him however the Cheshireman declined the offer, preferring to stay in the smaller and infinitely less lucrative pond that was the British film industry (Babington, 2002)
¤ “Versatility” Gilliat once said, “was always our curse”, but as Gilbert Adair remarked in a 1994 obituary for the film-maker, “it was also their own form of individualism”
◘ Cole as well appeared in nine of L & G’s films
❃ this was twice too often to the well as the preceding Great St Trinian’s Train Robbery (1966) was also a lame effort at rehashing the by now decidedly stale formula

⊹ ⊹ ⊹

[1] although such was the working symbiosis between the two that the non-directing partner would in all likelihood make suggestions for improvements to the designated director where necessary, B Babington, Launder and Gilliat (2002)
[2] quoted in The Age (Melbourne), 08-Jun-1994
[3] G Adair & N Roddick, A Night at the Pictures: Ten Decades of British Film, (1985)
[4] Babington describes Launder and Gilliat as “modest auteurs”, Babington, op.cit.
[5] Adair & Roddick, loc.cit.
[6] ‘Launder and Gilliat’, BFI Screenonline, www.screenonline.org.uk
[7] J Suh, ‘Women, Work, Leisure in British Wartime Documentary Realism’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 40(1), 2012
[8] ‘Obituary: Frank Launder’, The Independent, 24-Feb-1997, www.independent.co.uk
[9] ‘Charters and Caldicott’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; ‘Charters and Caldicott’, www.chartersandcaldicott.co.uk
[10] M Sweet, ‘Mustard and cress’, The Guardian, 29-Dec-2007, www.theguardian.com

Lexical Adventures in Suffixland: Getting Creative with Naut and Nik

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Literary & Linguistics, Popular Culture, Society & Culture

Two of the more interesting suffixes borrowed by English and put to good neologistic use are -naut and -nik. The origins of the word ‘naut’ have connotations of travel and water, Naut derives from an Ancient Greek word, translated as ‘naútēs‘, meaning ‘sailor’, sometimes rendered as ‘to navigate’. From naut we get the word ‘nautical’, something nautical relate of course to water and ships, although the root word naut has been employed to form new words which relates more to the sky or to atmosphere rather than to water.

✒︎ The Argonauts

༒

The first use of this suffix in the above sense seems to emanate from Greek mythology and the story of Jason and his crew who sailed according to legend in search of the Golden Fleece – the Argonauts. The etymology is: Classical Latin Argonauta; from Classical Greek Argonautēs; from Argō, Jason’s ship + nautēs, sailor; from naus, ship [Webster’s New World College Dictionary]. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles dates it’s use in English from 1596, so it’s been in currency for a long time.

The post-war phenomenon that has given naut words their impetus and continued relevance was the Space Race from the late 1950s, initially involving only the USSR and the United States. The US space program brought astronaut into common use , a word formed by simply conjoining the prefix astro (= stars) with naut. Far from being newly coined, the word itself has a history that long pre-dates the 1950s and 60s “Race to the Moon”. In 1930 the term was used in a pioneering Sci-Fi short story, ‘The Death’s Head Meteor’ by Neil R Jones (and there are other instances of the word in fiction go back to the late 19th century). The explorations of space fired the popular imagination, propelling astronaut into common usage to describe those (especially American) who ventured into space on behalf of the “Free World”. Astronaut may have been influenced by the term aeronaut (aero meaning air or atmosphere, as in aeronautics, from Ancient Greek aēr = air) in use to describe balloonists dating from the 1780s [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronaut]. With the long-term goal of reaching the Moon accomplished by the US in 1969 and further Moon missions planned, it was of no surprise that the more precise lunarnaut soon crept into the vocabulary.

As the Soviet Union entered the bipartite race with the intention of ‘conquering’ space and establishing a technological superiority over the US, the Russian Cold Warriors wanted for ideological reasons naturally enough to differentiate their extra-planetary achievements from those of their capitalist foes. So when the first successful spaceman Yuri Gagarin went up in Vostok I in 1961, the word cosmonaut (from Cosmos, the Universe, from Ancient Greek Kosmos = order) came into the lexicon – the New York Times attributed its genesis to Premier Khrushchev “and Soviet publications” [‘Russians coin a word for him: “Cosmonaut”, NYT, 13 April 1961].

✒︎ “astroboy” touches down

༒

Astronauts by other names
The expansion of the Space Race to other nations outside of the big two spawned a whole lot of other naut-based neologisms. The first Indian in space (1984) was initially depicted as a cosmonaut (because he flew under the Soviet space program), but Indian pride and patriotism and the advancement of their own, homegrown space program, soon led to the evolution of a distinctive term for Indian space-traveller, vyomanaut (from Sanskrit vyoman (= sky). Although among Hindi-speakers there has been some debate about the rival merits of other terms, eg, there is a measure of support for anthanaut (or antharnaut), derived from anthariksh, meaning ‘space’ in Hindi.

When China joined the “Man-in-Space Club” by launching their own pilot beyond the stratosphere in 2003, the Chinese inevitably found their own term to describe it – tàikōnaut (taikon the Chinese word for space or cosmos, derived from tàikōngrén = spaceman) [‘Taikonaut’, Language Log, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/]. Although it was apparently a Chinese-Malaysian who first used the term for Chinese astronaut and the Xinhua News Agency uses it in its English-language publications (but not the Shenzhou space program).
NB: For a pure Chinese rendering of the concept, either hángtiānyuán or yūhángyuán (literally translated as sky navigator or sailor and Universe navigator or sailor respectively) more accurately capture the essence of the meaning [ibid.]

Another word invented to describe the profession of space explorer of a specific country or region is spationaut, meaning a French astronaut, from Fr: spationaute (= space navigator). Spationaut is also used more generally to delineate astronauts from other European states, although a more suitable, generic term for this might be Euronaut.

Along the lines of aeronaut we also have aquanaut which might be a grander way of describing an underwater diver (the prefix ‘Aqua’, from Ancient Greek for water), which is distinct from an oceanaut whose scientific marine exploration is done in a submarine. ✒︎ A NASA aquanaut (source: theatlantic.com)

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Other -naut-suffixed terms signifying navigation in either a precise or looser sense include:

• chrononaut (a time-traveller – inspired by Doctor Who or Back to the Future?)
• cryonaut (one whose body is preserved by cryonics)
• cybernaut (a voyager in cyberspace; user of the internet or virtual reality. Could also be called an infonaut)
• gastronaut (person with a keen appreciation of food, ie, a more formal name for a ‘foodie’)
• hallucinaut (a hallucinator)
• neuronaut (one who studies the brain especially the effects of psychedelic drugs). cf. psychonaut who explores one’s own psyche under the effects of drugs.
• oneironaut (one who explores dream worlds)

As can be gleaned from the above there is a high degree of artificiality in the construction of many of these naut words. Some involve the choice of a convenient word (eg, gastronaut) rather than involving an act of literal navigation. Another concocted naut word with an interesting medical-related origin is responaut. The term was first applied c.1964 to a group of people at a particular facility in England with severe breathing difficulties whose condition needed them to be attached virtually permanently to the newly invented iron lung (mechanical respirator) in order to preserve their lives. ‘Responaut’ (formed from combining respirator + naut) was chosen because these patients experience similar problems to astronauts and oceanauts in establishing and maintaining communications and vital air supplies [Sunday Times (Lon), 12 January 1964, cited in Word Finder (Oxford English Dictionary), http://findwords.info/term/responaut].

The word Juggernaut contains the form of the naut suffix only by coincidence. It it unconnected to the idea of navigation or sailing, having come into English currency from a difference language group. Juggernaut derives from Sanskrit via a Hindi word, jagannath, meaning literally, world lord or protector. In English it has come to signify anything to which persons blindly devote themselves to or are ruthlessly crushed by [Shorter OED on Historical Principles].

Yinglish and spacerace-speak
Turning to words with the suffix ‘nik’, these come to English from a different path being of Slavonic origin with some Yiddish influence. Nik suffixes are very common in Slavonic languages, we find for example polkovnik (meaning colonel) in Russian, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian, Ukrainian and so on. Just as the Space Race gave naut words a new impetus, nik also found its way into English from Russian after the Soviet Union’s successfully launched a space craft named Sputnik in 1957.

The word beatnik was coined by journalist Herb Caen [San Francisco Chronicle, 2 April 1958] to describe adherents to the “Beat Generation”, a sort of subculture movement characterised by youthful anti-conformism, rebelling against the mainstream and hip culture (“being cool, man!”) (cf. the word ‘hipster’ as used today). Other traits include devotion to jazz, drug use and Eastern religions, and pseudo-intellectualism. Through the writings of ‘Beat’ leaders such as Jack Kerouac, other neologisms followed the pattern of beatnik … jazznik, bopnik, bugnik [Jack Kerouac, Brandeis Forum, ‘Is there a Beat Generation?’, 8 Nov. 1958, www.wnyc.org/story/.]

The Cold War tensions of the 1970s spawned another new word formed from the root nik – refusenik. Originally, refuseniks were individual citizens (many Jewish but not exclusively so) of the USSR and other Eastern Bloc countries who were denied permission by the Communist authorities to emigrate. Over time the application of ‘Refusenik’ in colloquial English has broadened to take on the meaning of “a person who refuses to do something, especially by way of protest” [Oxford English Dictionary (online)].

Peacenik is a word which has often been used in a derogatory way to describe someone who is an activist or demonstrator who opposes war and military intervention [www.dictionary.reference.com/browse/peacenik] (cf. “woke”/”wokeism”).The term is thought to have originated in the 1960s [possibly 1962 according to www.wordorigins.org]. Its precise origin is not known but very likely the term arose out either out of the anti-nuclear weapons movement or the anti-Vietnam War movement of the sixties. Peacenik is a synonym for pacifist or dove.

Holics – taking it to the nth degree
An unrelated but similarly manufactured word to peacenik is peaceoholic (sometimes spelt peaceaholic). Peaceaholic and other words with an -aholic or -oholic postfix are back-formed by analogy with the word alcoholic (into English from Arabic via French or Middle Latin). So we have shopaholic, workaholic, chocoholic, sexoholic, etc. which convey the sense of an addiction to or obsession with an activity or object.

Other nik words with a Yiddish flavour to them include Nudnik and Kibbutznik. Nudnik means obtuse, boring, a bothersome person a pest (nudyen = to bore). The Jewish Chronicle reports (18 February 2009) that Nudnik has entered modern Hebrew … “a common and even respected modus operandi in Israeli society”. A nudnik is someone “who is constantly asking you for something or otherwise taking up your time” [www.thejc.com]. Kibbutznik is a name given to workers who are members of an Israeli collective farm (a Kibbutz).