Grammar Girl here. I'm In Yon Fogarty, and today I am here with Dan Mizzdi and Rob

Meyerson, the illustrator and author of this fabulous new book, A B at C, that is a book of

grammograms with adorable cartoons to go with them. So, you know, first,

why don't you tell us what makes something a gramma gram? Sure, great question. So at grammergram,

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, IOU, you just can use the letters.

But also K-9 is actually spelled C-A-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 grammograms.

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 Grammar Grams that go back to the New Yorker. Yeah, sure. So, like,

the grandfather of Grammar Grams is William Styg, who is a legendary New York 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 see the B, like the C, look at the B,

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.

...