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I was reading Crayon Shin-chan—a Japanese manga—and came across a frame where
the characters' speech bubbles contain circles, triangles, and crosses where
words should be. I asked a couple of my Japanese friends about what the shapes
meant but none of them could tell me what they meant or why they were used.

[![A frame from Crayon Shin-
chan](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xjrfb.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xjrfb.jpg)
CC BY-SA 3.0
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question
manga
What do the triangles, circles, and squares mean in the context of manga?
Those are just placeholders. You should understand that instead of a
meaningful text those symbols were inserted in order to avoid putting actual
text. That can be done for various reasons: censor a word, make the reader
unaware of something the characters are aware of.

That being said, here, judging from the image the characters seem like they
are quarreling, thus we might think that the placeholders are just used to
cover up inappropriate words (for the audience).
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Those symbols do not mean anything. You, as a reader, can replace them by
actual words if you so desire.

From the surrounding words, the double exclamation marks and the
[プンプンマーク](https://search.yahoo.co.jp/image/search?rkf=2&ei=UTF-8&gdr=1&p=%E3%83%97%E3%83%B3%E3%83%97%E3%83%B3%E3%83%9E%E3%83%BC%E3%82%AF#mode%3Dsearch)
placed over the heads of the Mom and Dad, the readers will know instantly that
they are having a heated argument about their trip three years ago. The
content of the argument however, would be irrelevant to the story. 「プンプン」 is
an onomatopoeia for expressing anger.

The surrounding words that I am referring to are 「だいたいいつもおまえはな」("You know, you
always..")、「なによあなただって・・」(Whatcha talkin' bout? It's you
who...)、「そーゆーあなたこそ」、「だったくせに！！」, etc. I will not translate everything here for
free.

Another big reason that the content of the argument was made unclear on
purpose, IMHO, is to make Shin-chan's goofy remark stand out and make you
laugh at the end.

> "Hey, how old was I then? Was I as cute as I am now?"
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answer