Cacography
Cacography is deliberate comic misspelling, a type of humour similar to malapropism.[1][2]
The term in the sense of "poor spelling, accentuation, and punctuation" is a semantic antonym to orthography,[3] 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").
A common usage of cacography was to caricature illiterate speakers.[4]
See also
- Sensational spelling
- Catachresis
- Gaffe
- Typographical error
- Corruption (linguistics)
- Eye dialect
- Teh
- Pwn
- Leetspeak
- Lolcat
- Tiopês
References
- ↑ "On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying: the Underground Tradition of African-American Humor that Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor", by Mel Watkins, 1994, ISBN 0-671-68982-7, pp. 60, 62
- ↑ "A History of American Literature Since 1870" by Fred Lewis Pattee, 1917, p.34, digitized by Google Books
- ↑ "A Practical Grammar of French Rhetoric, by Gabriel Surenne", 1846, 150, digitized by Google Books
- ↑ "The literary content of the New York Spirit of the times, 1831-1856", by Richard Boyd Hauck", 1965, p. 184