Satiric misspelling

A satiric misspelling is the intentional misspelling of a word, phrase, or name for rhetorical effect. This can be achieved through techniques such as intentional malapropism (e.g. replacing erection for election), enallage (using incorrect grammar for effect, e.g., "we was robbed!"), or simply replacing one letter or symbol for another (e.g., using k instead of c), or symbol ($ instead of s).

Satiric misspelling is common today in informal writing on the Internet but also appears in serious political writing aimed at critiquing or opposing the status quo.

K replacing c

In political writing

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. 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.