Satiric misspelling

A satiric misspelling is an intentional misspelling of a word, phrase or name for a rhetorical purpose. This is often done by replacing a letter with another letter (for example, in English, "k" replacing "c"), or symbol (for example, in languages using the Latin character set, "$" replacing "s", or 🅱️ replacing "b"). Satiric misspelling is found widely today in informal writing on the Internet, but can also be found in some serious political writing that opposes the status quo.
"K" replacing "c".
In political writing.
Replacing the letter "c" with "k" in the first letter of a word came into use 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 , 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. 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.
A similar usage in Italian, Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese is to write "okupa" rather than "ocupa" (often on a building or area occupied by squatters, 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.
In humor.
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, spell "blassified" with a K? Klassified. Oh! I never thought of that before! What a silly bunt!"
"KKK" replacing "c" or "k".
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".
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 signs.
The currency symbols (¢, €, ￡, ₽, ₹, $, ₩, ¥) can be inserted in place of the letters ("C", "E", "L", "P", "R", "S", "W", "Y") to indicate plutocracy, greed, corruption, or the perceived immoral, unethical, or pathological accumulation of money. For example:
Word-in-word.
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:
🅱️ replacing hard consonants.
The negative squared letter B (🅱️; originally used to represent blood type B) 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. Common examples are:
Other significant respellings.
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". Likewise, "Private Eye" often refers to "The Guardian" as "The Grauniad", due to the newspaper's early reputation for typographical errors.
Backronyms.
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". 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" and sometimes "National Socialist Agency" by opponents of its PRISM program, who view it as dystopian encroachment on personal privacy.