Cacography

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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.

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

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1367594661 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.

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