Wordplay and cartoons: Inside the making of 'AB@C,' with Rob Meyerson and Dan Misdea
18:14 Share

Are you still quoting 30-year-old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide. And every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back. Welcome to the now. It pays to discover. Learn more at discover.com slash credit card based on the February 2024 Nelson report.

Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I am here with Dan Mizdia and Rob Meyerson, the illustrator and author of this fabulous new book, A Bee at Sea, that is a book of grammagrams with adorable cartoons to go with them. So, you know, first, why don't you tell us what makes something a grammagram?

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 I-O-U for this full sentence, I-O-U. 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 sort of run with it, you can actually create other words, less familiar words and full phrases and sentences. And all of those are gramograms. 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. Yeah, sure. So like the grandfather of gramograms is William Steig, who is

is a legendary New Yorker cartoonist who started in 1930. And it wasn't until like 20 years later that he came up with CDB, which was his first children's book and his forced foray into like wordplay. He was obsessed with wordplay just as an artist in general and writer. And that just for people who might not get it, that's C the B, like the C, C.

look at the B, the flying thing. So CDB, see the B. Yes, yes. So yeah, that was, I guess in the 50s or 60s, he came out with CDB. And, you know, 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 kind of take in his beautiful words and drawings. Yeah. Tell me more about the history of Grammagrams. Sure. Rob, you're the Grammagram. Yeah.

As far as I can tell, grammar grams go back as long as written language goes back. You know, you can find, well, the Wikipedia page on grammar grams is actually pretty informative. Yeah.

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 sort of 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 gramma gram 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 sort of 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 said,

That's how ABSC was created. Cool. How did the process work of the two of you working together to create these wonderful pairings between the gramograms and the illustrations? Yeah.

Sure. Yeah. I mean, when Rob pitched his idea, you know, I loved the fact that we were going to expand on Stagg's work, push the format. And, you know, he also sent me just extremely clever gramograms, just a very exhaustive list of them. And how it kind of worked is, you know, 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, you know, I would draw roughs, sketches, and send them over to Rob. And, you know, we would collaborate and have discussions and, you know, cut the gram grams from hundreds to about 50 or 60 that are in the book.

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 there were a bunch that didn't make it in. How interesting. What was sort of the underlying compelling thing about the ones that made it into the book that made them the winners? It's a 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 gramma gram, which is really

It's maybe more art than science. I mean, 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...

Well, you can say more if you allow for a little more flexibility. So, for example, you know, one of the ones in the book that's really simple is 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 grammar gram is you and then the number one twice. So you won one and then the number two.

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 sort of how you hear words in real life versus how things are perfectly pronounced. And so finding some that had that flexibility is,

It 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 sort of never clicks. And so, yeah, we had this whole range and we try 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

We're 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 like was a good number, which was about 60 of them.

Happy New Year! I know it's February, but we still get to say that because we can still adopt that New Year mindset of giving yourself a fresh start. And one way to do that is by looking in your closet because you can refresh your wardrobe, stay on budget, and feel better about yourself with a couple of new quality pieces from Quince. From

From their cozy Mongolian cashmere sweaters to their activewear that's designed to move with you during your workout, all Quince pieces are priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They're able to do that by partnering directly with top factories, cutting the cost of the middleman and passing the savings on to you. I love my cotton cashmere sweater and my lightweight cotton gauze roll shirt. I've worn them both in some of my YouTube videos, so you can see them.

So upgrade your closet this year without the upgraded price tag. Go to quince.com slash grammar for 365 day returns plus free shipping on your order. That's q-u-i-n-c-e dot com slash grammar to get free shipping and 365 day returns. quince.com slash grammar.

As you set resolutions for 2025, consider how learning a new language can enrich your life, whether through travel, career advancement, or cultural appreciation. Rosetta Stone has been a leader in language education for more than three decades with millions of satisfied users worldwide.

Es muy divertido! With courses in 25 languages, including Spanish, French, German, and more, you can choose a language to learn that unlocks new places, connections, and experiences.

Rosetta Stone's immersive approach means no English translations. You learn to think in your new language from day one. And the mobile app makes it easy to learn on the go, so you can conveniently fit in those lessons whenever you have a few spare minutes. Start the new year off with a resolution you can reach.

Today, Grammar Girl listeners can take advantage of Rosetta Stone's lifetime membership for 50% off. Visit rosettastone.com slash grammar. That's 50% off unlimited access to 25 language courses for the rest of your life. Get it today at rosettastone.com slash grammar.

Are you still quoting 30-year-old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide. And every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back. Welcome to the now. It pays to discover. Learn more at discover.com slash credit card based on the February 2024 Nelson report.

Do they actually get harder as you go through the book? 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. 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 kind of almost like a sawtooth arrangement of

easy, easy, hard, easy, easy, hard, but also a slow trajectory of getting some of the really, really kind of bigger, more challenging ones closer to the end of the book. Oh, that's good. Because 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 like personalized license plates, I'm

I never get them. There was a, there's a family joke. Um, there, there was a big like SUV outdoorsy vehicle in our town and it had, um, BK and BLK. 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. So every time there's a personalized license plate, my husband looks at me and goes bacon black. So yeah. So, um,

I struggle with these. 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 4% 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% of the license plates are personalized. Okay.

Do you have personalized license plates? And what do you think the connection is between Grammar Grams and those license plates? And why do some people like them more than others, it seems like? I don't. I'm 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 L.A. is known for being sort of a car culture. And so I feel like people just are willing to spend more money on cars.

on personalizing their cars in some ways. And I want to let you know that just a few days ago, I saw someone driving around my hometown Pacifica 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. No, it wasn't me. Nice though. Yeah, I couldn't believe that they were able to get, you know, just a fully spelled, properly spelled word. Because you're right, so often they are

In California, they only were available in the 70s. Okay. There is an overlap between gramograms and those personalized license plates, but they're not always one for one. So, you know, the constraint on the license plate, obviously, is 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. I mean, 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. Grammargrams should actually be in some ways easier in that you know what type of sort 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 grammergram.

But then you might have something where just one syllable is sort of the gram-a-gram effect. So later, for example, written as L8R is not really a gram-a-gram because you would say L8R, not later. But of course, the eight in the middle is doing that gram-a-gram thing of replacing a syllable with L8R.

a number in this case. And so 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. Yeah. 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. Yeah, Dan, 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 business stream for you. Yeah, I could use the extra cash flow. Yeah, and it would really help people like me. As I was going through the book, the illustrations did actually help me figure some of them out. Yeah.

I'm sure mission accomplished. What was the hardest part of working on this book? I'll go first. And then Dan, I don't know if you have a, 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 so it was hard for me to tell at times how hard some of these were or how easy they were. You know,

If I created them, it's almost by definition, I can solve them. Right. So it was really helpful. I got very lucky in that.

Dan is not only an amazing cartoonist and illustrator, but also really gets grammar grabs. 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. Yeah.

And so having those other people like Dan, but also family, friends to look at them and help kind of 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 get a sense of of how well some of them are working. Yeah, I totally agree. You know, it got easier for us to work together the more we did. And but at the same time, like.

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, and yeah, that's something that, you know, if we ever do have another book together, we'll try to be more aware of. But, you know, also we came up with even greater common or interpretations of gramograms, like the one with the puffer fish we had. So yeah,

Rob sent me a really simple gram gram. It was NLXL for inhale, exhale. And it originally just put like a yoga instructor inhaling and exhaling. Yep. There you go. And, you know, the more we sat with it, it's like, how can we make this funnier? How could, but while still getting the point across and yeah, puffer fish.

It was kind of like one of those aha moments. 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 that we did as we

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 Stagg'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 at 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 that at 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 used the pi symbol. We used the pound symbol for the British currency. We were able to get the degree symbol in here. Big numbers like two billion that Steig never played with. Decimal points, you know, things that really tried to push the gramma gram a little further and into new territory. And that's some of the places that we had the most fun with it.

Yeah, I noticed that. I noticed the pie and the big number. It was very clever. I'd never seen those before. I think 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 are your favorites? Can you each pick one favorite from the book? Sure. I guess I'll go first. And I have it prepared. Okay.

Oh, good. Or mine is chaos in the jacuzzi. And it's a shark in a jacuzzi with all these people frantically jumping out of the jacuzzi. And yeah, the actual gram gram 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 and

Yeah, I guess I'd give myself a pat on the back. I'll give you a pat on the back for that too. 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, you know, it's so gratifying to see what he can do with these and having his brilliant New Yorker cartoonist brain on these, you know, it's just, it really sort of takes it to another level.

So that is one of my favorites. If I had it's really hard to choose one. I mentioned, you know, 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 at a food truck in a city saying, I'll have a falafel sandwich.

because we were able to do that with just two letters repeated over and over again. It's L-F-F-L-F-L. So L-F-F-L-F-L is I'll have a falafel. I love how it's just two letters and the sort of rhythm of it. And it, you know, it takes you a second to get it. But Dan's cartoon, you know, literally has him pointing at the falafel sandwich on the food truck. So that helps. And yeah, that was a really fun one. Yeah, that was one where the illustration helped me too. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, Rob Meyerson and Dan Mazdia, creators of A Bee at Sea, this fabulous book, wherever fine books are sold. Thank you so much for being here today. Thanks so much for having us. Thanks, Ben-Yam. You bet. And Grammarpalusians, stick around, check your feed because we're going to get their book recommendations in the bonus segment. For everyone else, thank you so much for being here.