From Phil May's Illustrated Winter Annual, 1896.

From the Duluth Evening Herald, 1907.

From James Millikin University's 1915 yearbook.

From The Kodak Magazine, 1920.

From Purple Parrot, 1922.

From the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's 1920 yearbook.

Here's some maledicta punctuated by firecrackers, from Purdue's 1916 yearbook.

Here's some profanity from Pick Me Up, 1892.

Monkey versus parrot: which would you wager to win?  Plus, here's some maledicta from a c. 1890 ad for luncheon meat.

Here's some maledicta from Hearst's Magazine, 1913.  How many can you decode?  We've translated them as follows:

The circle overlapping an asterisk, followed by three exclamation points, means "asshole."

The D with a period means "damn."

The lopsided M with its four strokes means the four-syllable "motherfucker."

The lopsided H with its long cross stroke is a very cross "Hell."

But what about the I and question mark?  We couldn't find a single list of swear words that included any beginning with I.  Yet the letter I is in itself a swear word.  "'I' is a curse: 'I' is the labeled 'I' of oppression and condemnation.  'I' feels itself superior to other 'I's" (Lily Splane, "Elegy for the 'I,'" Quantum Consciousness).

Here's some Model T-era maledicta.

Here is some one-letter maledicta from Life, 1918.  To decipher what those letters mean, see One-Letter Words: A Dictionary.

Here's a form of cartoon swearing ("maledicta") from Metropolitan Magazine, 1911 — perhaps an exclamation of "Dingbat!" without the use of any dingbats.  The caption says it's a verb, and the "ding" part of "dingbat" probably traces back to the obsolete meaning "to deal a heavy blow."

Did you see this Slate headline? What exactly is the dirty word in question?

The headline has a couple of problems. Leaving out the colon between heading and subheading I can understand for clarity purposes [comedy drum roll]. But there's clearly a typo in the third word. Dirty words spelled with random symbols are simply nonsensical. My understanding is that letter substitutions were originally made carefully, not randomly. "Shit," for example, would have been written with a dollar sign for the "s", a pound sign for the "h," an exclamation mark or inverted exclamation mark for the dotted "i", and a dagger for the "t."

Such code is technically meaningless but clearly readable for content. Somewhere along the way, readers apparently weren't clever enough to decipher the obvious code and assumed that dirty words were to be represented by random symbols. And today even Slate boldly perpetuates the error, in bold type no less.

Granted, perhaps Slate meant to coin a new dirty word pronounced "IAHS." I'm game enough to try it out on occasion. Or perhaps Slate has something against the International Association of Hydrological Sciences, or the Institute of Applied Human Services, or even Indo-American Hybrid Seeds.

But that would be horseshit of an entirely different color.

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Jonathan Caws-Elwitt wrote:

Prior to the digital age, it was not uncommon for a typesetter to stumble
and upset an entire drawer of metal type onto the floor.  The stream of
colorful language that escaped the typesetter's mouth at such a moment
came to be represented, in print-shop legend, by the chaotic heap of type
at the clumsy individual's feet.  This may be the origin of the notion
that profanity is best represented by a random assortment of characters.