cacography

{{Short description|Deliberate misspelling for comic effect}}

Cacography is bad spelling or bad handwriting. The term in the sense of "poor spelling, accentuation, and punctuation" is a semantic antonym to orthography,{{cite book|title=A Practical Grammar of French Rhetoric|first=Gabriel|last=Surenne|date=1846|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=pTQEAAAAQAAJ&dq=cacography&pg=PA150|page=150}} 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.{{cite book|title=On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying: the Underground Tradition of African-American Humor that Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor|first=Mel|last=Watkins|author-link=Mel Watkins|date=1994|isbn=0-671-68982-7|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=BrNZAAAAMAAJ&q=cacography|pages=60, 62|publisher=Simon & Schuster}}{{cite book|title=A History of American Literature Since 1870|first=Fred Lewis|last=Pattee|date=1917|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=gs5ZAAAAMAAJ&dq=%22deliberate+misspelling%22&pg=PA34|page=34|publisher=Century Company |isbn=9781404766174 }}

A common usage of cacography is to caricature illiterate speakers,{{cite book|title=The Literary Content of the New York Spirit of the Times, 1831-1856|first=Richard Boyd|last=Hauck|date=1965|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=uws_AAAAIAAJ&q=cacography|page=184}} 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.{{Citation needed|date=December 2022}}