BRIFFITS & SQUEANS, BLURGITS & PLEWDS
By Grant Williams
In 1980, Addison Morton ‘Mort’ Walker, a man best known for creating the newspaper comic strips Beetle Bailey in 1950 and Hi and Lois in 1954, published a book entitled The Lexicon of Comicana which has subsequently become something of a bible for cartoonists.
In his book, Walker gave names to the shorthand symbols which, without our realising it, had, for decades, brought flat, two-dimensional images to life in the most extraordinary way.
Until The Lexicon of Comicana’s publication, nobody had given much thought to what the clouds of dust that trail behind fast-moving characters or linger in a spot where a character had suddenly dashed out of frame were called. They simply ‘were’.
Walker decided that needed to change and so he filed them under ‘B’, for ‘briffits’.
While he was at it, he decided the bubbles and open asterisks representing popped bubbles that appear over a drunk or sick character’s head should be christened ‘squeans’ and the drops of sweat emanating from a character’s head to indicate nervousness, stress, or working hard should henceforth be referred to as ‘plewds’.
‘Blurgits’ (in case you are wondering) are the parenthesis-shaped symbols used to indicate less intense movement, such as a nudge, shoulders shrugging, or slow walking and, while we’re at it, allow me to offer you a few more extracts from The Lexicon of Comicana so you can astound and amaze your friends.
The squiggly lines placed over an object to indicate radiant heat? Those, my friend, are ‘indotherms’.
‘Agitrons’ are the longer wiggly lines around something that is shaking or vibrating and ‘wafterons’ are both the squiggly solid shapes that taper to a point on both ends, used to indicate strong odors, either positive or negative (the former typically filled with white, the latter with a sickly green) or, in their smaller form, when drawn above warm food items (like a pie cooling on the windowsill) will typically indicate both heat and odour.
There. Tell me you can’t win a bet or two in the pub armed with that information.
The Lexicon of Comicana does a wonderful job of corralling a bunch of nonsense into a handy compendium so it seemed like the perfect way to introduce this week’s Things That Make You Go Hmmm… because, as is always the case when I take one of my rare publishing hiatuses, there has been a whole bunch of nonsense bubble up since my last edition – any single thread of which could form the basis for an entire edition of Things That Make You Go Hmmm…, so I thought we’d spend this week catching up on a couple of them.
We begin with the stealth deterioration of the U.S. housing market.
The collapse of the housing market just a decade ago was the epicentre of the most turbulent period in the global economy since The Great Depression.
It’s extraordinary that we seem to need reminding of the depths to which our collective despair sank in the dark days of 2007-2009, but all that lovely printed money courtesy of the world’s central banks has clearly dulled the senses (just as it was intended to do).
By way of a reminder, the U.S. housing sector was, at the time, ‘systemically important’ – important enough that its decline brought the entire world to the brink of catastrophe and, though I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, I have to tell you that nothing has changed.
OK, so maybe some things have changed in the financial circus that surrounds the U.S. housing market, but its importance remains undiminished.
As you can see from the chart below, the NAHB Unbridled Optimism Index Housing Market Index has turned down in the last few months after a series of wobbles. This index measures the views of respondents to the question of whether the market for new homes is good or not.https://blog.evergreengavekal.com/briffits-squeans-blurgits-plewds/
