scratchitti?!

Riding the L train, I saw on the video screen that subway graffiti and scratchitti are punishable by law. What the hell is scratchitti you may ask.. Apparently this is what people are calling graffiti in which no marker or paint is involved, just carvings into glass or other surfaces. Technically, this should just be called graffiti.

It turns out graffiti, and graffito (the singular), come from the italian word graffiato, meaning "scratched." So originally, the word graffiti referred to carvings or imagery scratched into a surface. Since then, the word has evolved to include any kind of drawing on a public surface. What is crazy to me is that the word's meaning, or at least people's understanding of it, has changed to the point that a new word is being made up to fit the original definition. Even worse that the new word is so stupid sounding. Does this happen often in language?

I've noticed a new form of vandalism in the subways lately. Someone (or some people) is going around slicing out parts of posters and pasting them onto other posters, to comical or ironic effect. I hereby declare this new form of subway poster vandalism Cut-and-paste-iffiti, which is just as dumb-sounding as scratchitti.