Did you know that, like aglets for the end of a shoelace or tittle for the dot atop an i, there’s a whole delightful host of terms for the visual cues used in comic strips?

Invented chiefly by cartoonist Mort Walker in a half-joking illustrated mini-dictionary called The Lexicon of Comicana, they include plewds (the big drops of sweat that spring off the foreheads of anxious characters), spurls (the woozy spirals above a characters who’s had too much to drink), and nittles (any star-shaped symbol that subs in for real letters when a character cusses).

Read John Brownlee’s piece at Fast Company for more on vocab morsels and the importance of visual symbology.