Monday, March 10, 2014

Portmanteau

portmanteau - a word that, like “Thanksgivukkah,” is created by running together truncated parts of two separate words.

From Why Thanksgivukkah Is a Portmanteau — and What That Means – Forward.com:

Whatever languages are spoken 77,000 years from now (unless we’re all communicating by brain chip long before that), portmanteau words will probably still exist in them. That’s a word that, like “Thanksgivukkah,” is created by running together truncated parts of two separate words. Sometimes these fusion words are mere jokes or curiosities, like “Thanksgivukkah” or “tiglon,” which is a cross between a tiger and a lion. (Personally, I’ve never encountered a tiglon, but if you ever do, that’s what you should call it.) In quite a few cases, however, they have entered our everyday vocabulary. Consider “smog,” “brunch,” “cheeseburger,” “newscast,” “motel” and other words that we no longer even think of as artificial creations. Others, like “guesstimate” or “stagflation,” though their artificiality is still felt, are now used regularly, too. 
A portmanteau was, in its last, 19th-century incarnation, a leather suitcase that opened into two separate compartments. (The term is, fittingly, a portmanteau word itself, coming from French porter, to carry, and manteau, a coat; the original portmanteau was a French adjutant who carried an officer’s cloak or bag.) It was first compared with two fused words by Lewis Carroll in “Through the Looking Glass”(1872), his sequel to “Alice in Wonderland.” There, Alice is engrossed in conversation with Humpty Dumpty, whom she asks to explain Carroll’s immortal nonsense poem “The Jabberwocky.” After she recites its first lines of “’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; / All mimsy were the borogoves, / And the mome raths outgrabe,” the narrative proceeds: 
“That’s enough to begin with,” Humpty Dumpty interrupted. “There are plenty of hard words there. ‘Brillig’ means five o’clock in the afternoon — the time when you begin broiling things for dinner.” 
“That’ll do very well,” said Alice. “And slithy?” 
“Well, slithy means lithe and slimy…. You see, it’s like a portmanteau — two meanings packed into one word.”


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