It's Kadigan Weather

The world of comics has always had its own set of rules.

The laws of physics are dispensed with, animals can speak, and cartoonists even have their own vocabulary.

Mort Walker, the cartoonist behind beloved strips such as Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois, captured this special language in his 1980 book The Lexicon of Comicana. If you’re lucky, you can still pick up a copy of this rare item.

Walker did the world a service, not only by giving names to common items that we see in many comic strips, but revealed universal illustration techniques.

See if these seem familiar to you:

• Agitrons: wiggly lines around a shaking object or character.

• Blurgits, swalloops: curved lines preceding or trailing after a character's moving limbs.

• Briffits (💨): clouds of dust that hang in the wake of a swiftly departing character or object.

• Dites, hites and vites: straight lines drawn across flat, clear and reflective surfaces, such as windows and mirrors. The first letter indicates direction: diagonal, horizontal and vertical respectively. Hites may also be used trailing after something moving with great speed.

• Emanata: lines drawn around the head to indicate shock or surprise

• Grawlixes (#, $, *, @): typographical symbols standing in for profanities, appearing in dialogue balloons in place of actual dialogue (related entry: A Little *@#& History).

• Indotherm (♨): wavy, rising lines used to represent steam or heat.

• Lucaflect: a shiny spot on a surface of something, depicted as a four-paned window shape.

• Plewds (💦): flying sweat droplets that appear around a character's head when working hard, stressed, etc.

• Quimps (🪐): A special example of the grawlix, a symbol resembling the planet Saturn.

• Solrads: radiating lines drawn from something luminous like a lightbulb or the sun.

• Squeans (💫): little starbursts or circles that signify intoxication, dizziness, or sickness.

Source: The Lexicon of Comicana (Wikipedia)

You couldn’t be faulted for not knowing what any of those visuals are called; normally, we’d just describe them like the definitions do.

But language is wonderful in that it pushes us to give names to things. Even things we can’t quite describe.

Placeholder

When we can’t find a specific word or description for something, we often use placeholder words instead.

Generic and ambiguous terms like whatchamacallit, widget, doohickey, thingamajig, nicknack, odds and ends, oh-dark-thirty, whatsit.

They’re strange words, but are meant to convey uncertainty and nonspecificity.

George Carlin captured this well in “Some Werds”:

“It’s like odds and ends. You’ve got 24 odds and ends on a table and 23 of them fall off, what have you got — an odd or an end?”

These are also known as kadigans.

Kadigans come in many different varieties:

Businesses:

Acme, NewCo, Mom & Pop

Names:

John Doe or Jane Doe, Joe Schmoe, Tom, Dick, and Harry, what’s-his-name, or my mom’s favorite: whojamajjinger.

Geography:

Podunk, boondocks, Anytown, Main Street

Numbers:

Umpteen, bazillion

It’s All Greek to Me

I’ll leave you with this one — one that puzzled me for many years.

The generic Latin lorem ipsum text used in publishing and graphic design is also an example of a kadigan. It was originally a corruption of a text by Marcus Tullius Cicero from the first century BC.

As someone who once worked in the ad industry and was a classics major, I find it ironic that the lorem ipsum placeholder copy —lifted from Cicero’s Latin — is called “Greek” in industry parlance.

If only John Q. Public knew.

There’s so much to learn,