SNP’s word of the day: Cacography

Word: Cacography

Definition: Bad, messy handwriting, from Greek kakos (bad) and graphy (writing). The opposite of calligraphy. It can also mean bad spelling, but you don’t want to get me started on that, f’reals.

Usage: “John Lennon had the raddest cacography.”

Why you should know it: Because while, in the electronic age, good handwriting is a lost art, bad handwriting is an ever-more important art form.

Cacography, if you think about it long enough, can encompass everything from Egyptian hieroglyphics to Cy Twombly’s painted scribbles and scratches. Twombly, who went RIP earlier this month, was derided in the ’50s for his improvisational art, which began as automatic drawing under his bedsheets as a kid and later came alive like cave-wall scratches under flickering light. Now, he’s revered, and rightly so. His work makes a mess out of beauty, or vice versa.

Twombly’s also considered the father of contemporary graffiti—an art form, albeit one that took some time to be recognized as such, cemented in culture by pop heroes from Basquiat to Banksy. At the MOCA in Los Angeles, the director, ex–New York gallerist Jeffrey Deitch, made a major street show his first order of business. (Which makes it all the sadder to me that meanwhile, in Toronto, the mayor has promised to scrub our streets clean of what so many people believe is—or at least can be—art.)

Graffiti, which comes from the Italian word for “scratch,” is a way cooler word than cacography. Imagine a movie called American Cacography. Like, no.

But the word cacography reminds us that what we now call graffiti began with “bad” (as in not technically good, where “good” is boring) handwriting, not “bad” (as in immoral) acts of tagging and vandalism. It’s an imperfect, incredibly human and instinctual form of expression. I hope we always have it; even when graffiti is ugly, it’s better than a blank wall. It’s only human to want to leave our mark on the impassive; to leave a mess.

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