A smile for today.....Any of you run across this on microfilm? Weird Words: Cacography Bad handwriting or bad spelling. We should use this word more; it's too useful and relevant to let it fade away. It derives from the Greek 'graphos', "writing", prefixed with 'kakos', "bad". We're more familiar with this as the beginning of 'cacophony', "bad noises"; despite the association of ideas, it has nothing to do with our 'cack-handed', which derives from Old English 'cack', "excrement". When 'cacography' began to appear in English at the end of the sixteenth century it did so with the sense of "bad spelling". It was beginning to be thought that the old way of spelling words by personal preference ought to give way to a standardised system; the introduction of printing had a lot to do with this. So 'cacography' was seen as the opposite of 'orthography', "correct spelling". In the following century it was also used to mean bad handwriting, as the opposite of yet a third Greek word, 'calligraphy', "fine writing". The word is marked as archaic in my dictionaries, though it still turns up from time to time. A typical usage was that by the horror writer H P Lovecraft, who described the manuscript of his novel _Quebeck_ as "136 pages of crabbed cacography" (in reference presumably to the handwriting rather than the spelling). Someone who exhibits either failing is a 'cacographer'. ----------------------- To subscribe to World Wide Words, e-mail the list server at <[email protected]> from the e-mail address which is to receive mailings with the message text SUBSCRIBE WORLDWIDEWORDS First_name Last_name