Cacography Explained

Cacography is bad spelling or bad handwriting. The term in the sense of "poor spelling, accentuation, and punctuation" is a semantic antonym to orthography,[1] 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.[2] [3]

A common usage of cacography is to caricature illiterate speakers,[4] 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

References

Notes and References

  1. Book: Surenne, Gabriel. A Practical Grammar of French Rhetoric. 1846. 150.
  2. Book: Watkins, Mel. On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying: the Underground Tradition of African-American Humor that Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor. Mel Watkins. 1994. 0-671-68982-7. 60, 62. Simon & Schuster.
  3. Book: Pattee, Fred Lewis. A History of American Literature Since 1870. 1917. 34. Century Company . 9781404766174 .
  4. Book: Hauck, Richard Boyd. The Literary Content of the New York Spirit of the Times, 1831-1856. 1965. 184.