"K" Replacing "C"
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 ranks of the Klan.
In the 1960s and early 1970s in the United States, leftists, particularly the Yippies, sometimes used "Amerika" rather than "America" in referring to the United States. It is still used as a political statement today. It is likely that this was originally an allusion to the German spelling of America, and intended to be suggestive of Nazism, a hypothesis that the Oxford English Dictionary supports.
In broader usage, the replacement of the letter "C" with "K" denotes general political skepticism about the topic at hand and is intended to discredit or debase the term in which the replacement occurs. Detractors sometimes spell former U.S. president Bill Clinton's name as "Klinton" or "Klintoon".
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), which is particularly remarkable because the letter "k" is rarely found in either Spanish, Portuguese or Italian words. It stems from Spanish anarchist and punk movements which used "k" to signal rebellion.
Read more about this topic: Satiric Misspelling
Famous quotes containing the word replacing:
“I do not mean to imply that the good old days were perfect. But the institutions and structure—the web—of society needed reform, not demolition. To have cut the institutional and community strands without replacing them with new ones proved to be a form of abuse to one generation and to the next. For so many Americans, the tragedy was not in dreaming that life could be better; the tragedy was that the dreaming ended.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)