You can read a plewd. You just didn’t know its name.

Picture a character in a comic strip who has just been handed terrible news. Three or four little droplets leap off the sides of their head, arcing outward like sparks. You did not pause over that panel. You did not wonder why a drawn person would suddenly shed water from their scalp. You simply read it — stress, panic, the floor dropping away — in less time than it takes to blink, and moved on to the next frame.

Now try to say how you learned to do that. Nobody taught you. There was no page in any schoolbook headed “how to interpret the flying sweat droplet.” And yet you, and billions of other people across languages that share almost no words, all read it the same way, instantly and without instruction. The comics are stitched together from dozens of these little marks, a whole silent grammar running underneath the dialogue — and for most of the twentieth century, none of it had names.

The man who catalogued the invisible

The person who finally named it was Mort Walker (1923–2018), the American cartoonist behind Beetle Bailey, the army-barracks strip he launched in 1950 and drew for very nearly seventy years. Walker spent his working life inside this visual shorthand, and somewhere along the way he noticed the strange fact at the heart of it: the marks were everywhere, every reader understood them, and nobody had ever bothered to give them a vocabulary.

So he invented one. In 1980 he published The Lexicon of Comicana (Comicana, Inc., Port Chester, New York), a mock-scholarly field guide to the devices cartoonists use, written with his tongue firmly in his cheek. He had floated the joke years earlier, in a straight-faced article for his fellow cartoonists with the splendid title “Let’s Get Down to Grawlixes.” The Lexicon pushed it to its logical extreme: Walker claimed to have surveyed cartoons from around the world and identified a shared, international set of symbols, which he christened symbolia — the wordless signs, like the Zzz that means sleep, that read the same in any language.

The genius of the book is that the names are preposterous and the observation is completely real. There is a system there. We all do read it. Walker just had the nerve to act as though it deserved a dictionary.

A field guide to marks you already know

Once you have the names, you cannot unsee them. Here is a short tour of Walker’s coinages — every one of which describes something you have been reading fluently your whole life:

Plewds — the flying beads of sweat that signal stress, effort or panic.
Briffits — the little cloud of dust a character leaves behind when they bolt out of frame.
Hites — the horizontal speed lines trailing a fast-moving body.
Squeans — the small starbursts and spinning circles that mean drunkenness, dizziness or sickness.
Agitrons — the wiggly lines around something shaking or vibrating.
Indotherm — the rising waves that tell you a thing is hot.
Grawlix — the string of typographic symbols (@#$%&!) standing in for a word nobody is allowed to print.
Emanata — the lines radiating from a head to show shock or surprise.

He kept going — there is a lucaflect, the tiny warped reflection of a window you see on a shiny curved surface, which no one had ever named and everyone had always drawn — but the list above is enough to make the point. Read it back and notice what happens: you are not learning new concepts. You already knew every one of these marks cold. What you are learning is that the thing you knew has a name.

The joke that half came true

Walker never expected his vocabulary to be taken literally. It was a gag, a cartoonist poking fun at the idea that doodles might merit scholarship. And for the most part the joke stayed a joke: linguists who have looked closely are gently skeptical, pointing out that the great majority of Walker’s words never caught on and were never really meant to.

But a couple of them slipped the leash. Grawlix is now the word people reach for when they need to name that row of cartoon swear-symbols, turning up in style guides and dictionaries of slang. And emanata escaped furthest of all: it crossed from a comic strip into the academic study of comics. Scholars adopted it — the critic Andrei Molotiu lists it in his glossary of comics terms — and in the process quietly widened it. Walker meant it narrowly, just the surprise-lines bursting off a head; in use, it has stretched to cover almost any mark that seems to emanate from a character to show an inner state, a sound, a smell, an impact. The name outgrew its inventor’s definition, which is exactly what living words do.

The marks were everywhere, every reader understood them, and nobody had ever given them a vocabulary. Walker had the nerve to act as though they deserved a dictionary.

So the Lexicon turned out to be two things at once: a comedian’s bit, and a genuine piece of observation that keeps being rediscovered. It was reissued in 2025 by New York Review Comics, with an introduction by the cartoonist Chris Ware — proof that a joke, met by enough people over enough years, can harden into something people treat as true.

Knowing a thing before you can name it

Here is why a book of made-up words for cartoon doodles belongs in a journal about learning. It dramatises a gap we rarely notice in ourselves: the distance between using something fluently and being able to name or define it. You had total command of the plewd and the briffit while being unable to produce a single label for either. Your understanding ran far, far ahead of your vocabulary for it.

That gap is the whole texture of learning a language. There is a well-known lag between the words you can recognise and the words you can summon — you understand a sentence long before you could have built it yourself. And crucially, the recognition did not come from a definition. You never studied the sweat droplet; you simply met it over and over, in context, until its meaning was automatic. Decode once, if at all; recognise forever.

That is the opposite of how we often imagine vocabulary is supposed to work — as though a word were a fact you install by reading its entry. The comics quietly prove otherwise. The marks became second nature through sheer repeated encounter, each one a little more familiar than the last, meaning arriving before analysis. The name, when it finally came, was almost beside the point. You already knew.

Where vocabla fits

A new word handed to you as a dictionary entry is a label without a picture — a definition you have to translate every time you meet it. A word met the way you met the plewd is something else: understood on sight, in context, before you have time to reach for your own language. The goal is not to memorise the word. It is to meet it enough times that recognition becomes automatic and the definition stops mattering.

That is the whole idea behind vocabla. It never hands you a word as a lonely line to install. Across French, German, Italian, Spanish and Russian, each word turns up in real sentences and comes back often enough to cross the line Mort Walker’s readers crossed without noticing — the line between a thing you work out every time and a thing that simply means what it means. Because in the end, everything has a name — but you understand it long before you need one.