Intentional misspellings, or as the Mau Mau crew from Spike Lee's Bamboozled might put it, Intenshynal Mizzpellings, are often utilized as a display of non-conformity. The character played by rapper Charli Baltimore explains this perspective in the clip below (her explanation begins at 0:30) ***explicit language ahead***
Intentional misspellings in hip-hop music during this time turned out to be a fad, but like many fads, it faded away and only to reappear. Everything old becomes new again, right? To wit, Bamboozled was released in 2000 but intentional misspellings have re-emerged in 2017 with a twist; this time around, they're being used to circumvent low Nielsen Ratings. From the Wall Street Journal:
Boosting TV ratings is easy for networks that don’t mind playing dumb.
In a game largely sanctioned by TV-ratings firm Nielsen, television networks try to hide their shows’ poor performances on any given night by forgetting how to spell.
That explains the appearance of “NBC Nitely News,” which apparently aired on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend this year, when a lot of people were away from their TVs. The retitling of “NBC Nightly News” fooled Nielsen’s automated system, which listed “Nitely” as a separate show.
Hiding the May 26 program from Nielsen dramatically improved the show’s average viewership that week. Instead of falling further behind first-place rival “ABC World News Tonight,” NBC news narrowed the gap.
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Debate over the effectiveness/ audience capture of Nielsen ratings abounds, but we at Dystopian Futurez would like to remind our advertisers that our mizzpelling is intenshuynal to keep ad rates low. Also, Bamboozled is a classic. New Line, what's up with a Blu-Ray?