1052. What do “CDB” and “U11 2” have in common? They’re both examples of gramograms! This week, I chat with writer Rob Meyerson and New Yorker cartoonist Dan Misdea about their book "AB@C," a fun collection of gramograms—letters, numbers, and symbols that form words when read aloud. We look at the history of this quirky wordplay and the artistic process behind the book’s illustrations.
1052. What do “CDB” and “U11 2” have in common? They’re both examples of gramograms!
This week, I chat with writer Rob Meyerson and New Yorker cartoonist Dan Misdea about their book "AB@C," a fun collection of gramograms—letters, numbers, and symbols that form words when read aloud. We look at the history of this quirky wordplay and the artistic process behind the book’s illustrations.
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MIGNON: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I am here with Dan Misdea and Rob Meyerson, the illustrator and author of this fabulous new book, "AB@C" that is a book of gramograms with adorable cartoons to go with them. So, you know, first, why don't you tell us what makes something a gramogram?
ROB: Sure. Great question. So a gramogram — we've been calling them bite-sized bits of wordplay and what they are are letters, numbers, or symbols that you say out loud to form a word. So common ones that we're all familiar with are “IOU” — for this full sentence “I owe you,” you just can use the letters — but also “canine” is actually spelled C A N I N E, but we often almost always abbreviate it to just capital “K” and the number “nine.”
So if you take that and run with it, you can actually create other words, less familiar words and full phrases and sentences. And all of those are gramograms.
MIGNON: Wonderful. And Dan, you are a cartoonist, and you've done work for The New Yorker. And I understand there's a long history of gramograms that go back to The New Yorker.
DAN: Yeah, sure. Like the grandfather of gramograms is William Steig, who is a legendary New York cartoonist who started in 1930. And it wasn't until 20 years later that he came up with CDB, which was his first children's book and his first foray into like wordplay. He was obsessed with wordplay, just as an artist in general and writer.
MIGNON: And that, just for people who might not get it, that's see, the bee, like “see” to look at the bee, the flying thing. So CDB, see the bee.
DAN: Yes. Yes. Yeah, that was, I guess, in the '50s or '60s, he came out with "CDB," and he came out with other works beyond that, "Shrek!," "Amos and Boris." And yeah, I always looked up to his work. I suggest anyone to look him up and just take in his beautiful words and drawings.
MIGNON: Yeah. Tell me more about the history of gramograms.
DAN: Sure. Rob, you're the gramogram aficionado.
ROB: As far as I can tell, gramograms go back as long as written language goes back. You can find — the Wikipedia page on gramograms is actually pretty informative — and I believe there are examples that go back to ancient Rome and things like that. This idea of pairing them with cartoons, as we've done, really is William Steig's innovation from the '50s or '60s.
He wrote another book called "CDC." So “see the sea,” as in the ocean that came out in the ‘80s. And that's actually the one that I saw as a kid, my mom is, luckily for me, a children's librarian. She worked at schools, and saw this book when it came out in the ‘80s, and brought it home for me.
And I loved it. And I was reading it to my son a few years ago, and he loved it. And that is what led to this book from me and from Dan. So I read that book to my son and put it down at the end of the night and tried to go to sleep. And all of a sudden new gramogram ideas just started popping into my head.
And I thought, “Oh, I don't think that one is in the book.” And I would check and say, “Oh, I actually just accidentally came up with something new.” And it kept happening. They kept bubbling up in my brain over the next week or two. And I started writing them down and one thing led to the next.
I was lucky enough to know a guy, a childhood friend who runs the Weekly Humorist, an online humor magazine, and he works with New Yorker cartoonists. And I said, “Hey, do you know somebody who would be able to draw cartoons to go with these gramograms?” And he put me in touch with Dan, and that's how "AB@C" was created.
MIGNON: Cool. How did the process work of the two of you working together to create these wonderful pairings between the, the gramograms and the illustrations?
DAN: Sure. Yeah. When Rob pitched his idea, I loved the fact that we were going to expand on Steig's work, push the format, and he also sent me just extremely clever gramograms, just the very exhaustive list of them. And how it worked is I picked out some of my favorites, and I tried to pick ones that were clever, but also suggested a really funny or interesting image. And, I would draw rough sketches, and send them over to Rob, and we would collaborate, and have discussions, and cut the gramograms from hundreds to about 50 or 60 that are in the book.
MIGNON: Yeah, I was going to say, yeah, I was just going to ask you that because there's about 60 in the book. So there were a bunch that didn't make it in. How interesting. What made, you know, what was sort of the underlying compelling thing about the ones that made it into the book that, that made them the winners?
ROB: It's a range of different things. As Dan said, we wanted them to be funny, if possible. We wanted them — for me a lot of it is about trying to figure out what makes a good gramogram, which is really, it's maybe more art than science. There are some that I would call a perfect gramogram.
So "canine" again, for example, is perfect in that it sounds exactly like the letter K and the number nine, but some of the best ones are imperfect. And those are nice because you can say more if you allow for a little more flexibility. So for example, one of the ones in the book that's really simple is “you want one too.”
It's a mom at an ice cream truck and holding an ice cream cone out to her daughter. But the gramogram is U and then the number one twice. So “U11” and then the number 2. And so that just shows you how the number one can be “want,” but also “one,” if you just allow for a little bit of flexibility on the pronunciation, and you work more on how you hear words in real life versus how things are perfectly pronounced.
And so finding some that had that flexibility gives you more range, but it also makes them sometimes a little harder to solve. It gives you that "aha" effect of having to read it a few times, look at the drawing. And that's one of the things we were really going for was something that was clever in a way that pushed you a little bit, but not too much, just like any good puzzle does, right?
You want to strike that balance of having it be frustrating enough that when you do solve it, you get that dopamine hit of, "Aha, I figured something out," but not make it so hard that it just never clicks. And yeah, we had this whole range, and we tried to range in the book from really, really easy ones to, towards the end, things that are more complex and a little harder to solve.
Dan and I worked a lot on figuring out which ones were best, but we were lucky to have a great publisher that helped us with that too, and gave feedback. We asked friends and family to look at early drafts and give us feedback as well. And so we just narrowed it down to what we felt was a good number, which was about 60 of them.
MIGNON: Do they actually get harder as you go through the book?
ROB: Roughly, but we wanted to put some harder ones at the beginning of the book so that people would get an idea of how complex these could get, how challenging or interesting they could be so that it wasn't, we didn't want people to put down the book after reading five thinking, "Oh, these are so easy. It's not even worth my time." So it was almost like a sawtooth arrangement of easy, easy, hard, easy, easy, hard, but also a slow trajectory of getting some of the really, bigger, more challenging ones closer to the end of the book.
MIGNON: Oh, that's good. Because yeah, as I went through it, I got some, and I didn't get others, and I did not notice it was getting harder toward the end. So it's not just me. I am notoriously bad at these. So, you know, the personal, like personalized license plates, I never get them. There's a family joke there, there was a big SUV, outdoorsy vehicle in our town, and it had, “B K N B L K.” And it was, in retrospect, it was obviously “back in black,” but I looked at it for the longest time and I said, “bacon black”? And so every time there's a personalized license plate, my husband looks at it, and he goes, “Bacon black?”
So, yeah. So I struggle with these. I actually for this, I did look up personalized license plates go back to 1931. That was when they were first offered. And a survey in 2007 said that about four percent of license plates in the U. S. are personalized. But what surprised me was that it varies a lot by state.
So in Virginia, like 16 or 17 percent of the license plates are personalized. Do, do, I'm curious, do you have personalized license plates? And what do you think the connection is between gramograms and those license plates? And why do some people like them more than others?
ROB: Yeah, I don't, but I was just going to guess — I live in California — and I was going to guess that we have a high percentage of them here. I feel like especially LA is known for being a car culture, and so I feel like people just are willing to spend more money on, on personalizing their cars in some ways.
And I wanna let you know that just a few days ago I saw someone driving around my hometown Pacifico with the personalized license plate “grammar,” just the full word, correctly spelled. And I just thought, oh my God, I have to meet that person. It wasn't you, I take it.
MIGNON: No, it wasn't me. Nice thought.
ROB: Yeah, I couldn't believe that they were able to get, just a fully spelled, properly spelled word.
Because you're right. So often they are abbreviations. And so there is…
MIGNON: In California, they only were available in the '70s.
ROB: Okay. There is an overlap between gramograms and those personalized license plates, but they're not always one for one. The constraint on the license plate, obviously, as you're trying to convey some idea in about seven characters, I think, in most states. And so you can use any kind of abbreviation to do that.
People use their initials. They can use sometimes symbols like a heart symbol on a license plate that may vary from state to state too.Gramograms should actually be in some ways easier in that you know what type of coding we're using to translate letters into words. It's always that just say it out loud, and it should sound like the word.
Whereas on a license plate, you might have a gramogram, but then you might have something where just one syllable is the gramogram effect. “Later,” for example, written as “L8R” is not really a gramogram because you would say "L8R," not "later," but of course the eight in the middle is doing that gramogram thing of replacing a syllable with a number in this case.
And they can be quite challenging. There's also no spaces, usually no punctuation that we can use a little bit more in gramograms to just give you some sense of what we're trying to say. So I agree those license plates can be a real puzzle.
DAN: And that's usually where the image comes in too. It should suggest what the gramogram is trying to communicate. And yeah, that was challenging at times, but that's also why we made a good team.
ROB: You should start offering people cartoons to go with their personalized license plates so that we can all tell what they're trying to say. It's a new, maybe a new business stream for you.
DAN: Yeah, I could use the extra cash flow. Yeah.
MIGNON: Yeah. And now it would really help people like me.
ROB: There you go.
MIGNON: You know, as I was going, as I was going through the book, the illustrations did actually help me figure some of them out.
ROB: I'm sure…
MIGNON: What was the hardest part of working on this book?
ROB: I'll go first, and then Dan, I don't know if you have another answer. I do think, like anything else, when you work on something for a long time, you start to get a little too close to it maybe. And it was hard for me to tell at times how hard some of these were or how easy they were. If I created them, almost by definition, I can solve them.
So it was really helpful. I got very lucky in that Dan is not only an amazing cartoonist and illustrator, but also really gets gramograms. They just seem to have clicked with him. And I also think from working together, he's gotten even better at them. So now when I send him new ideas, which I still do, even though the book is out, he gets even what I think are the hardest ones almost immediately.
Whereas other people, my wife, for example, who's obviously seen them all too, still like they just don't quite click with her as well. And so having those other people like Dan, but also family, friends to look at them and help determine whether they're working was really helpful. I think that was one of the hardest things for me was just to take a step back and get a sense of how well some of them are working.
DAN: Yeah, I totally agree. It got easier for us to work together the more we did. And, but at the same time, it was also, you had to still put yourself in the reader's shoes and be like, does this gramogram work? Does the image compliment the gramogram? And yeah, that's something that, if we ever do have another book together, we'll try to be more aware of.
Also, we came up with even greater interpretations of gramograms, like the one with the puffer fish we had. So Rob sent me a really simple gramogram. It was, “NLXL” for “inhale, exhale” and originally just put, like a yoga instructor inhaling and exhaling. There you go.
MIGNON: If you're watching the YouTube version, I'm holding it up.
DAN: And the more we sat with yeah. And the more we sat with it, it's like, how can we make this funnier? How could — while still getting the point across? And, yeah. Puffer fish, it was like one of those … elements.
Right. Yeah, it is. We're trying to hit a lot of targets at once, right? We're trying to help you solve them, but also make them funny, make them clever, but not too clever. Another thing, Mignon, that we did as we got further and further into this is look for more and more symbols or characters that we could use.
And what I'm really happy that we were able to do is just break new ground. As Dan said, this is all sort of an homage to Steig's work and brilliance, and certainly, we're building on a form that he created, but in doing so, we wanted to try to find some ways to innovate.
And even in the title, the reason we got that @ symbol in the title is to show that, that's a character that in the '80s, wouldn't have been as communicative to people. But since the dawning of the Internet and email addresses, everybody knows that @ symbol, you say it “at” out loud.
Whereas back in the '80s, maybe people would have not been quite so confident using that. And so not only that, but we use the pi symbol. We use the pound symbol for the British currency. We were able to get the degree symbol in here. Big numbers, like 2 billion that Steig never played with, decimal points, things that really tried to push the gramogram a little further and into new territory. And that's some of the places that we have the most fun with it.
MIGNON: Yeah, I noticed that. I noticed the pi and the big number. It was very clever. I'd never seen those before. I think, you know, long-time listeners will know that I love penguins, and my favorite one is the two penguins clinking glasses, and it says formal attire. Again, I'm holding that up on the YouTube. To wrap up what, what are your favorite?
Can you each pick one favorite from the book?
DAN: Sure. I guess I'll go first, and I have it prepared.
MIGNON: Good.
DAN: Or mine is chaos in the jacuzzi and…
MIGNON: Oh, nice.
DAN: It's a shark in a jacuzzi with all these people frantically jumping out of the jacuzzi. And, yeah, the actual gramogram is “K S N D J Q Z.” And that was one that for me, I liked because it was so hard to come up with illustration for it.
And, yeah, I guess I'd give myself a pat on the back for that one. So…
ROB: I'll give you a pat on the back for that too, that I love that one as well. And that's one of the ones where when Dan sent it to me, I literally laughed out loud, and it's so gratifying to see what he can do, with these, and having his brilliant New Yorker cartoonist brain on these. It's just, it really takes it to another level.
So that is one of my favorites. If I had, it's really hard to choose one. I mentioned I love the way we were able to bring in some of the other symbols. And so those ones that do that are some of my favorites, but sometimes the simplest ones are best. And, one of the ones I like is a guy at a food truck in a city saying, “I'll have a falafel.”
Because we were able to do that with just two letters repeated over and over again, it's “L F FL F L.” So “L FF LFL” is “I'll have a falafel.” And I love how it's just two letters and the sort of rhythm of it. And it takes you a second to get it, but Dan's cartoon literally has him pointing at the falafel sandwich on the food truck.
So that helps. And yeah, that, that was a really fun one.
MIGNON: Yeah, that was one where the illustration helped me, too.
ROB: Absolutely.
MIGNON: Yeah. Well, Rob Meyerson and Dan Misdea, creators of "AB@C," this fabulous book, wherever fine books are sold. Thank you so much for being here today.
ROB: Thanks so much for having us.
DAN: Thanks, Mignon.
MIGNON: You bet. And Grammarpaloozians, stick around, check your feed, because we're gonna get their book recommendations in the bonus segment.
For everyone else, thank you so much for being here.