A satiric misspelling is an intentional misspelling of a word, phrase or name for a rhetorical purpose. This can be achieved with intentional malapropism (e.g. replacing erection for election), enallage (giving a sentence the wrong form, eg. "we was robbed!"), or simply replacing a letter with another letter (for example, in English, k replacing c ), or symbol ( $ replacing s ). Satiric misspelling is found widely today in informal writing on the Internet, but is also made in some serious political writing that opposes the status quo.
Replacing the letter c with k in the first letter of a word was used by the Ku Klux Klan during its early years in the mid-to-late 19th century. The concept is continued today within the group. For something similar in the writing of groups opposed to the KKK, see § KKK replacing c or k, below.
In the 1960s and early 1970s in the United States, the Yippies sometimes used Amerika rather than America in referring to the United States. [1] [2] [3] According to Oxford Dictionaries , it was an allusion to the Russian and German spellings of the word and intended to be suggestive of fascism and authoritarianism. [1]
A similar usage in Italian, Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese [ citation needed ] is to write okupa rather than ocupa (often on a building or area occupied by squatters), [4] [ better source needed ] referring to the name adopted by okupación activist groups. It stems from a combination of English borrowings with k in them to those languages, and Spanish anarchist and punk movements which used "k" to signal rebellion. [5]
Replacing "c" with "k" was at the center of a Monty Python joke from the Travel Agent sketch. Eric Idle's character has an affliction that makes him pronounce the letter C as a B, as in "blassified" instead of "classified". Michael Palin asks him if he can say the letter K; Idle replies that he can, and Palin suggests that he spell words with a K instead of C. Idle replies: "what, you mean, pronounce 'blassified' with a K? [...] Klassified. [...] Oh, it's very good! I never thought of that before! What a silly bunt!" [6]
A common satiric usage of the letters KKK is the spelling of America as Amerikkka, alluding to the Ku Klux Klan, referring to underlying racism in American society. The earliest known usage of Amerikkka recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary is in July 1970, in an African-American magazine called Black World . [7]
The spelling Amerikkka came into greater use after the 1990 release of the gangsta rap album AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted by Ice Cube. The letters KKK have been inserted into several other words and names, to indicate similar perceived racism, oppression or corruption. Examples include:
Currency symbols like €, $ and £ can be inserted in place of the letters E, S and L respectively to indicate plutocracy, greed, corruption, or the perceived immoral, unethical, or pathological accumulation of money. For example:
Occasionally a word written in its orthodox spelling is altered with internal capital letters, hyphens, italics, or other devices so as to highlight a fortuitous pun. Some examples:
In the mid-2000s, lolcat image macros were captioned with deliberate misspellings, known as "lolspeak", such as a cat asking "I can haz cheezburger?" [39] Blogger Anil Dash described the intentionally poor spelling and fractured grammar as "kitty pidgin". [39]
The negative squared letter B (🅱️; originally used to represent blood type B) [40] can be used to replace hard consonants as an internet meme. This originates from the practice of members of the Bloods replacing the letter C with the letter B, but has been extended to any consonant. [41] [42] Common examples are:
Various different instances of intentional misspellings of animal names have been made as internet memes. The mid-2000s lolcat memes used spellings such as kitteh for kitty. [43]
The 2013 Doge meme is a deliberate misspelling of dog . [44]
The internet slang of DoggoLingo, which appeared around the same time, spells dog as doggo and also includes respelled words for puppy (pupper) and other animals such as bird (birb) and snake (snek). [45] Respellings in DoggoLingo usually alter the pronunciation of the word.
Along the same lines, intentional misspellings can be used to promote a specific negative attribute, real or perceived, of a product or service. This is especially effective if the misspelling is done by replacing part of the word with another that has identical phonetic qualities.
Journalists may make a politicized editorial decision by choosing to differentially retain (or even create) misspellings, mispronunciations, ungrammaticisms, dialect variants, or interjections.
The British political satire magazine Private Eye has a long-standing theme of insulting the law firm Carter-Ruck by replacing the R with an F to read Carter-Fuck. The law firm once requested that Private Eye cease spelling its name like that; the magazine then started spelling it "Farter-Fuck". [46] Likewise, Private Eye often refers to The Guardian as The Grauniad , [47] due to the newspaper's early reputation for typographical errors. [48]
Plays on acronyms and initialisms are also common, when the full name is spelled out but one of the component words is replaced by another. For example, Richard Stallman and other Free Software Foundation executives often refer to digital rights management as "digital restrictions management". [49] a reference to the tendency for DRM to stifle the end user's ability to reshare music or write CDs more than a certain number of times. Likewise, the National Security Agency is often referred to as the "National Surveillance Agency" [50] [51] [52] [53] and sometimes "National Socialist Agency" [54] [55] by opponents of its PRISM program, who view it as dystopian encroachment on personal privacy.
Leet, also known as eleet or leetspeak, or simply hacker speech, is a system of modified spellings used primarily on the Internet. It often uses character replacements in ways that play on the similarity of their glyphs via reflection or other resemblance. Additionally, it modifies certain words on the basis of a system of suffixes and alternative meanings. There are many dialects or linguistic varieties in different online communities.
The Shavian alphabet is a constructed alphabet conceived as a way to provide simple, phonemic orthography for the English language to replace the inefficiencies and difficulties of conventional spelling using the Latin alphabet. It was posthumously funded by and named after Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw.
The International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet or simply Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet, commonly known as the NATO phonetic alphabet, is the most widely used set of clear-code words for communicating the letters of the Roman alphabet. Technically a radiotelephonic spelling alphabet, it goes by various names, including NATO spelling alphabet, ICAO phonetic alphabet and ICAO spelling alphabet. The ITU phonetic alphabet and figure code is a rarely used variant that differs in the code words for digits.
Spelling is a set of conventions for written language regarding how graphemes should correspond to the sounds of spoken language. Spelling is one of the elements of orthography, and highly standardized spelling is a prescriptive element.
The Swedish alphabet is a basic element of the Latin writing system used for the Swedish language. The 29 letters of this alphabet are the modern 26-letter basic Latin alphabet plus ⟨å⟩, ⟨ä⟩, and ⟨ö⟩, in that order. It contains 20 consonants and 9 vowels. The Latin alphabet was brought to Sweden along with the Christianization of the population, although runes continued in use throughout the first centuries of Christianity, even for ecclesiastic purposes, despite their traditional relation to the Old Norse religion. The runes underwent partial "latinization" in the Middle Ages, when the Latin alphabet was completely accepted as the Swedish script system, but runes still occurred, especially in the countryside, until the 18th century, and were used decoratively until mid 19th century.
In software, a spell checker is a software feature that checks for misspellings in a text. Spell-checking features are often embedded in software or services, such as a word processor, email client, electronic dictionary, or search engine.
Cut Spelling is a system of English-language spelling reform which reduces redundant letters and makes substitutions to improve correspondence with the spoken word. It was designed by Christopher Upward and was for a time being popularized by the Simplified Spelling Society. The resulting words are 8–15% shorter than standard spellings. The name Cut Spelling was coined by psychologist Valerie Yule.
A typographical error, also called a misprint, is a mistake made in the typing of printed or electronic material. Historically, this referred to mistakes in manual typesetting. Technically, the term includes errors due to mechanical failure or slips of the hand or finger, but excludes errors of ignorance, such as spelling errors, or changing and misuse of words such as "than" and "then". Before the arrival of printing, the copyist's mistake or scribal error was the equivalent for manuscripts. Most typos involve simple duplication, omission, transposition, or substitution of a small number of characters.
KKK most commonly refers to the Ku Klux Klan, an American white supremacist group.
Preved is a term used in the Padonkaffsky jargon, a meme in the Russian-speaking Internet which developed out of a heavily circulated picture, and consists of choosing alternative spellings for words for comic effect. The picture, a modified version of John Lurie's watercolor Bear Surprise, whose popularity was stoked by emails and blogs, features a man and a woman having sex in the clearing of a forest, being surprised by a bear calling "Surprise!" with its paws raised. In later Russian adaptations, the bear shouts "Preved!". In keeping with a popular trend of image manipulation, the iconic bear — dubbed Medved, a misspelling of медведь ("bear") — has been inserted into many other pictures where his appearance adds a new dimension to the joke.
In the Latin-based orthographies of many European languages, including English, a distinction between hard and soft ⟨c⟩ occurs in which ⟨c⟩ represents two distinct phonemes. The sound of a hard ⟨c⟩ often precedes the non-front vowels ⟨a⟩, ⟨o⟩ and ⟨u⟩, and is that of the voiceless velar stop,. The sound of a soft ⟨c⟩, typically before ⟨e⟩, ⟨i⟩ and ⟨y⟩, may be a fricative or affricate, depending on the language. In English, the sound of soft ⟨c⟩ is.
A spelling alphabet is a set of words used to represent the letters of an alphabet in oral communication, especially over a two-way radio or telephone. The words chosen to represent the letters sound sufficiently different from each other to clearly differentiate them. This avoids any confusion that could easily otherwise result from the names of letters that sound similar, except for some small difference easily missed or easily degraded by the imperfect sound quality of the apparatus. For example, in the Latin alphabet, the letters B, P, and D sound similar and could easily be confused, but the words "bravo", "papa" and "delta" sound completely different, making confusion unlikely.
A lolcat, or LOLcat, is an image macro of one or more cats. Lolcat images' idiosyncratic and intentionally grammatically incorrect text is known as lolspeak.
Typosquatting, also called URL hijacking, a sting site, a cousin domain, or a fake URL, is a form of cybersquatting, and possibly brandjacking which relies on mistakes such as typos made by Internet users when inputting a website address into a web browser. A user accidentally entering an incorrect website address may be led to any URL, including an alternative website owned by a cybersquatter.
Commonly misspelled English words are words that are often unintentionally misspelled in general writing.
Miguxês, also known in Portugal as pita talk or pita script, is an Internet slang of the Portuguese language that was popular in the 2000's and early 2010's among Brazilian teenagers on the Internet and other electronic media, such as messages written on cell phones.
Doge is an Internet meme that became popular in 2013. The meme consists of a picture of a Shiba Inu dog, accompanied by multicolored text in Comic Sans font in the foreground. The text, representing a kind of internal monologue, is deliberately written in a form of broken English. The meme originally and most frequently uses an image of a Shiba Inu named Kabosu, though versions with other Shiba Inus are also popular.
Covfefe is a word, widely presumed to be a typographical error, that Donald Trump used in a viral tweet when he was President of the United States. It quickly became an Internet meme.
DoggoLingo is an Internet language that is created from word conversion, meme lexicon, and onomatopoeia. Emerging in the 2010s, DoggoLingo is implied to be a dog's own idiom, and is presented as a canine's thought process. Elyse Graham, assistant professor at Stony Brook University, describes DoggoLingo as "upbeat, joyful, and clueless in a relentlessly friendly way".
Balltze, nicknamed Cheems in online memes, was a Shiba Inu from Hong Kong. He was called Ball Ball by his owners.
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