Holy $#!%: Where Did The Symbolic Swear Come From?

Why is @#$%&! naughty?

When the force of a swear word is too extreme (but some form of cuss must be used) symbolic stand-ins have long been used for lewdness. Suffice it to say, any emotional keyboard-striker can blurt out something that people perceive as a sub for swears. Whether it’s to diminish the force of swear, to get around censorship rules, or maybe just because symbols are @#$%ing cool to look at, people still use symbolic swearing today.

How did symbols come to signify taboo language? Much of the answer lies in comic strips. But, before we get there, we’ve got to go over some of the history of typographical bleeping.

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Typo-bleeping gets more colorful

Using symbols for swears has a long history (some even think it traces back to Ancient Egypt, as so many things do). But, leave it to two wild kids, Hans and Fritz, to be the ones responsible for today’s buffet of symbolic swears. The tykes were characters in The Katzenjammer Kids, a comic strip from the early 1900s. Rudolph Dirks, the twenty-year old German immigrant cartoonist who drew the kids into being, likely invented both the speech bubble and the comic iconography of profanity—how’s that for posterity.

The first recorded use of symbolic swearing occurs in a 1902 episode of the comic, where the impish Katzenjammers mess with Uncle Heinie on a ladder. Fuming, Uncle Heinie unleashes a speech bubble of “[star]-[anchor]-!-!-?-[dung pile?]”; the anchor is a particularly nice touch, what with “swearing like a sailor” and all.