The letter “D” corresponds tothe Semiticdalethand Greekdelta(Δ). “D” is also the Roman numeral for 500. The form (D) is thought toderivefrom an early pictograph, possiblyEgyptian, indicating the folding door of a tent. Later “D” got its more rounded shape, with which we are familiar, from theChalcidian alphabet,which the Latins may have borrowed for their alphabet (https://www.britannica.com/topic/D-letter). Words beginning with “D”, numero quattro in the English alphabetical order, are an eclectic lot. They can be delightful, decadent or distasteful. Here’s a brief sampler of logophile-friendly “D” words for serious verbivores. 
The chances are most folk with a passing interest in words and language have come across the odd Malapropism and Spoonerism in their travels. For these two terms for errors in natural speech (or if you prefer, modes of original linguistic inventiveness) we have the fictional “Mrs Malaprop” and the real life “Reverend Spooner” to thank. Myself, I tend to associate Malapropisms (the accidental substitution of a incorrect word in place of another, usually similar-sounding one) in fiction with Arthur Daley, the small-time, dodgy as-they-get wheeler dealer in TV’s Minder (“From now on the world is your lobster”, the “Arfur” Daley variation on “oyster”) and in real life with former Australian PM Tony Abbott (“the suppository of all wisdom” (should have said “repository”)). Spoonerisms are another type of verbal misstep where the speaker makes a “slip of the tongue”, accidentally transposing the initial consonants of two consecutive words, often with humorous results. One of the most referenced examples is “you have hissed my mystery lecture”, instead of “you have missed my history lecture”.
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Would the latte-sipping, smashed avocado inner city set recognise a Mondegreen, Mumpsimus or Eggcorn when they see one? Probably not, these three linguistic odd fellows are the domain of dedicated language buffs and word nerds. If the ABC conducted a vox-pop in Martin Place “Mondegreen” would likely draw a blank, however the concept itself is a different story…anyone exposed to popular music would have at some point either unknowingly committed a Mondegreen or observed someone else in the act. A Mondegreen is where you mishear or misinterpret a phrase—especially a song lyric but it could also be a line from a poem—with the result that you give it a new and different meaning. I can hear the ranks of the slightly incredulous intoning “I didn’t know there was a word for that!”
Hendrix “excuse me…”
Given the associated factors of diction and high volume noise, Mondegreenisms in modern pop music are legion, one of the most iconic is the misinterpretation by untold number of listeners of Jimi Hendrix’s line, “Excuse me while I kiss the sky” (“Purple Haze”) as “Excuse me while I kiss the guy“. Two more classic confusions warranting honourable mention are The Beatles’ “The girl with kaleidoscope eyes” transformed by an erring ear into “The girl with colitis goes by” (from “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”) and Johnny Nash’s “I can see clearly now, the rain has gone”, reinterpreted as “I can see clearly now, Lorraine has gone”. As these examples indicate, where the lyrics come unstuck it’s a fair chance that the culprit is a quasi-hononym.
Coining of Mondegreen: the word (but not the act) originated in 1954 with American writer Sylvia Wright…as a girl listening to her mother readIng a 18th century romantic poem she erroneously heard “Lady Mondegreen” instead of the actual lyric, “layd him on the green”. On being advised of her error Sylvia thought her interpretation “better than the original” and stuck to it, even inserting a character named “Lady Mondegreen” into her published stories.
Incoherent or indecipherable words in a song can be the source of “great storms in a teacup”. The Kingsmen’s 1963 recording of “Louie Louie” (vocalised incomprehensibly by Jack Ely) prompted an avalanche of complaints from outraged parents of teenagers about a supposed litany of obscene and pornographic lyrics in the single. Knee-jerk misinterpretations abounded from the morally-incensed in Middle America. One irate father even wrote to US attorney general Bobby Kennedy moaning about the lyrics’ “moral degradation” leading bizarrely to the FBI investigating the song (the Bureau failed to unearth any such obscenities)! All of which lends credence to the axiom that “people will hear what they want to hear” – which goes to the very heart of Mondegreens※.
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Mumpsimus are a different kettle of aquatic, craniate gill-bearing animals. Practitioners of Mumpsimus stubbornly insist on an incorrect usage…even after being proven wrong” (Fritinancy). Mumpsimustas obstinately cling to an error, bad habit or prejudice, even after the foible is exposed. Examples include the use of “all intensive purposes” in lieu of the correct phrase, “all intents and purposes”; the verbal substitution of “nuclear” with “nucular” (a proclivity of George W Bush)§.
The Eggcorn: slight of hand or sleight of hand?
Another, related form of expression that derives from mishearing and involves reinterpretation is “Eggcorn”. Eggcorns, like Mondegreens revolve around the near-homonym while differing from Mumpsimus in that their use is unconscious and unintentional. It often occurs when people are ignorant of the precise words in stock phrases and substitute what they erroneously believe to be the correct words or expression. Examples are manifold – saying “mute point” instead of “moot point”; “tenderhooks” instead of “tenterhooks”; “pass mustard” instead of “pass muster” etc ad nauseum. An essential feature of the eggcorn is that it must retain some of the original meaning as the speaker understands it (eg, Alzheimer’s disease is rendered into “Old-timer’s disease”). The term itself is an “Eggcorn”, it’s genesis can be traced back to a creative utterance from an anonymous individual who inserted the word “eggcorn” where the similarly sounding “acorn” would conventionally go (Mark Lieberman, 2003).
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※ Steven Connor suggests that cognitive dissonance is in train in the creation of Mondegreens – the brain is constantly trying “to make sense of the world by making assumptions to fill in the gaps when it cannot clearly determine what it is hearing” (‘Earslips: Of Mishearings and Mondegreens’, 2009)
§ the word Mumpsimus, a confused misinterpretation of the Latin term “Sumpsimus” (“we have received”), was accidentally coined by an old monk who doggedly persisted in using the invented word. Mumpsimus first appears in the correspondence of famous humanist scholar Erasmus Roterodamus, dating from 1516
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.
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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)
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❉ 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
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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
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Incoherent or indecipherable words in a song can be the source of “great storms in a teacup”. The Kingsmen’s 1963 recording of “Louie Louie” (vocalised incomprehensibly by Jack Ely) prompted an avalanche of complaints from outraged parents of teenagers about a supposed litany of obscene and pornographic lyrics in the single. Knee-jerk misinterpretations abounded from the morally-incensed in Middle America. One irate father even wrote to US attorney general Bobby Kennedy moaning about the lyrics’ “moral degradation” leading bizarrely to the FBI investigating the song (the Bureau failed to unearth any such obscenities)! All of which lends credence to the axiom that “people will hear what they want to hear” – which goes to the very heart of Mondegreens※.
(Image credit: www.7esl.com)
