Cacography
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Calligraphy and cacography respectively mean good and bad writing. It is therefore pleonastic to speak of excellent calligraphy or wretched cacography; and to describe the former as wretched would simply be to say that at the same time it was both excellent and the reverse."--A Desk-Book of Errors in English (1906) by Frank Horace Vizetelly |
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Cacography is deliberate comic misspelling, a type of humor similar to malapropism.
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") + γραφή (graphe "writing").
A common usage of cacography was to caricature illiterate speakers.
Russian internet
The Russian internet culture witnessed an explosive growth of Russian language cacography of particular, systematic types, see articles Padonki and Udaff. One way of corruption is phonetic spelling of Russian words, i.e., an exaggerated way of "natural" erring, e.g., Ниасилил (Niasilil) – "didn't cope with (to read in full)" (correct spelling: не осилил, ne osilil), a typical response to a long and/or boring post. Another way is grotesque hypercorrection: the word is spelled in such a way that when pronounced, it sounds in a correct way. An example is a Russian internet meme Preved, which is pronounced as and intends to mean, privet, i.e., "hello", "hi". In 2005 philologist Gasan Guseinov suggested the neologism Эрратив (errativ, i.e., "errative") to refer to the phenomenon.
See also
- Typographical error
- Satirical misspelling
- Sensational spelling
- Catachresis
- Gaffe
- Corruption (linguistics)
- Eye dialect
- Teh
- Lolcat
- Tiopês
