Deliberately mispronouncing words

I like malapropism for it as well but I feel like describing it as "fatuous malapropism" helps to clarify that it's being done porpoisefully. I also feel like it doesn't quite cover the intentional misspelling of words that is frequently a component. Like "doge" instead of dog or "birb" instead of bird.

Whether I personally find the practice funny or not isn't relevant – I just think it's too widespread at this point for it not to have it's own word.

A Language Log item from April 3, 2008, "Saying It Wrong on Porpoise," doesn't identify a comprehensive technical term beyond intentional mispronunciation:

Grant Barrett is now doing a weekly language column for the Malaysia Star, and this week he talks about saying things the wrong way on purpose — intentional errors like the Internets and coinkydink. The column got picked up by Jason Kottke's blog, where commenters are chiming in with their own examples.

Just in case anyone thought this was a new phenomenon (hello again, Recency Illusion), an article on "Intentional Mispronunciations" appeared in the journal American Speech way back in 1932. If you don't have access to JSTOR and you're not a member of the American Dialect Society, you'll have to make do with this recent summary by Larry Horn on the ADS mailing list:

Margaret Reed (1932), "Intentional Mispronunciations". American Speech 7: 192-99.

This covers what Reed took to be a fad among the "light-hearted youth" of Central Westerners (she's writing from Nebraska) to circulate...well, intentional mispronunciations. (She's following up on a paper by Louise Pound from 10 years earlier in Dialect Notes.) Her categories include everything from adding or subtracting syllables and restressing (antique as "an-tee-cue", "champeen", "the-'ater"), tensing lax vowels ("genu-wine"), borrowing of "vulgar" pronunciations ("agin", "extry", "who'd-a thunk it", "varmint"), "Al Smith" English [a.k.a. Brooklynese, not a moniker Reed herself applies] ("boid", "noives", "toity-toid street", "winegar woiks"), the "extremely annoying" affectation of children's speech ("sojer", "sword" [with /w/, as we've been discussing recently], "Injun", "ax" for 'ask' [!-- she does add 'also archaic' for this], "itty bitty"), Yiddishisms ("epple", "darlink", "dun't esk"), various other dialect borrowings ("enyhoo", "pitcher" [for 'picture'], "divil"), blends and folk etymological forms ("bumbershoot", "brass-ear", "animule", "absotively"), misdivisions ("a tall", "a norange", but not "a whole nother"), spelling pronunciations ("k-nife", "g-nat", "X-mas"), and so on. She ends with the wistful hope that while "human nature" may be responsible for perpetuating this fad (or these fads--unclear how many causal factors are involved), "surely, in its fullest and most extreme form, the phenomenon is now passing its peak".

The summary of Read's article is useful for identifying what species of mispronunciation a particular derangement falls into. For example I-rack and A-rab fall into the restressing subcategory, pisgeddy into the affectation of children's speech, bidniss is regional imitative (in this case, G.W. Bush Texan), and miv-sivvum (a pronunciation I picked up from Enoch Emery in Wise Blood, who is trying to sound out the word "MVSEVM" as carved in stark capital letters on a building's edifice) is a spelling pronunciation.

The earlier article (mentioned above in Larry Horn's summary of Reed's article) on the phenomenon—Louise Pound, "Intentional Mispronunciations in the Central West," in Dialect Notes, volume 5, part 5 (1922)—is available for reading in its entirety at no charge through Google Books. Pound offers detailed categories including "process syllable division" (such as "a ninfindel"); "stretch forms" (such as "be-youtiful"); "syllable inversions" (such as "ossifer"), and "blends" (such as "democrazy"). It's a fairly brief but interesting survey of the subject.

None of these resources ventures beyond intentional mispronunciation as a blanket term for the phenomenon. Pound and Read do try to give names to the subcategories of mispronunciation that they discuss, but they don't seem to use the same terminology (judging from Pound's article and the summary of Reed's).