Cacography is bad spelling or bad handwriting. The term in the sense of "poor spelling, accentuation, and punctuation" is a semantic antonym to orthography, and in the sense of "poor handwriting" it is an etymological antonym to the word calligraphy: cacography is from Greek κακός (kakos "bad") and γραφή (graphe "writing").
Cacography is also deliberate comic misspelling, a type of humour similar to malapropism.
A common usage of cacography is to caricature illiterate speakers, as with eye dialect spelling. Others include the use to indicate that something was written by a child, to indirectly voice a cute or funny animal in a meme such as the captioned photo of a British shorthair that was the namesake of I Can Has Cheezburger?, or because the misspelling bears a humorous resemblance to a completely unrelated word.
See also
- Satirical misspelling
- Sensational spelling
- Catachresis
- Gaffe
- Corruption (linguistics)
- Eye dialect
- Teh
- Lolcat
- Tiopês
References
- Surenne, Gabriel (1846). A Practical Grammar of French Rhetoric. p. 150.
- Watkins, Mel (1994). On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying: the Underground Tradition of African-American Humor that Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor. Simon & Schuster. pp. 60, 62. ISBN 0-671-68982-7.
- Pattee, Fred Lewis (1917). A History of American Literature Since 1870. Century Company. p. 34. ISBN 9781404766174.
- Hauck, Richard Boyd (1965). The Literary Content of the New York Spirit of the Times, 1831-1856. p. 184.
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