Thursday 24 June 2010

Portmanteaus


When Alice went Through the Looking Glass she came across a strange poem called Jabberwocky, which was full of unfamiliar words. So when she met egg-head Humpty Dumpty, she asked him what some of them meant. "Slithy", for example. He replied:

Well, "SLITHY" means "lithe and slimy." "Lithe" is the same as "active." You see it's like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word.'

These days, we reserve "portmanteau" for two-in-one words – its "suitcase" meaning is no more.

Sometimes portmanteaus just arise spontaneously:

impestuous
(tempestuous, impetuous)
inferior decoration
(inferior, interior)
sperratic
(sporadic and erratic)
caterpaulted
(caterpulted and vaulted)
climp
(clamp and cling with a suggestion of limpet)
intertwingle (twine and mingle)

Sometimes they incorporate names:
parentokil (to be applied to love rats – yahoo news)
unitard

Camillagate

Frankenfoods

Bollywood

monokini

tankini

Slockney (Sloane plus Cockney)

Time
-style coinages are more deliberate:

actorvist
affluencers
bistronomique
brandlord

celebrinerd

clipumentary

democratators
(for elected dictators)
eduvangelical
(Ben Goldacre’s blog)
Eurocrat

fakeumentary

fauxstalgia
(nostalgia for somewhere you’ve never been, a time when you weren’t alive)
gargantoplex (Roger Ebert)
giganchises
henchgoon
insinuendo

instapundit
locavore
malvertising
mathlete
nonebrity

paydar
(sense of who can afford it/who has paid what when)
proglodytes
(prog rock fans)
racevestite
(Is it because I is black?)
sheeple
(Andy Giddings)
skipverts

taxiles
tentalow (tent and bungalow)
voluntourism
wreckovations

youthquake


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