The Portmanteau Years
Remember that suitcase your mother had—that sixties’ green, plastic shell, hinged on one side with latches on the other, that suitcase that opened into two equally sized compartments? That’s a portmanteau. I’d bet that Lewis Carroll had one of those suitcases, too, because he took its name to coin some good jabberwocky: Humpty Dumpty says, “Well, slithy means lithe and slimy…You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.”
Some portmanteaux have been around the block: grumbling (growling + rumbling), chortle (chuckle + snort), flare (flame + glare) and of course, motel (motor + hotel). When I was growing up, we ate with sporks and watched while the TV showed infomercials and televangelists all day.
But when I think about the past decade, I think about the renewed American obsession with packing words together. Brangelina. Sexting. Bromance. And there are the failed ones: octomom (mother to octuplets), botax (a levy on cosmetic procedures), Poliwood (political stars, think: Reagan or Brangelina), and bragabond (someone who travels a lot and brags about it).
I’ve been trying to think of what makes a freshly coined portmanteau succeed or fail, how to coin a decent one when a simple prefix or suffix won’t work. Tom Wolfe had his statusphere. Dane Cook practically sneezes these combos out. (You may be thinking, “For shizzle,” sure + shit.) Between weekly magazines and user-generated internet content, I wondered if we’re just too swamped with these suitcases to have many stick.
Then I found this list of Time magazine portmanteaux of the 1930s: samisentiment (samisen + sentiment); prohibishop (Prohibition + bishop); Gibbonish (Gibbons + gibberish); Bolithusiast (Bolitho + enthusiast), Brisbanality (Brisbane + banality).
So I guess they’ll fail when too tied into current pop culture or politics—when prohibition ends, when botox doesn’t get levied, when Brangelina breaks back into separate identities. They’ll fail when the potential readership is too slight to recognize a bragabond when they read about one, or to care about badgergasms. But I’ll challenge you all the same to spice up some writing with poignant little portmanteau.
One of my favorites is fantabulous (fantastic + fabulous).
It’s funny how portmanteau sounds so French when German is replete with words like this. In fact, German often mashes five or six words together to make something that sounds like someone choking, sneezing, laughing, and belching at the same time. And they probably have a hyper-portmanteau for that as well.
My personal favorite of late is “fucktard,” (fucking + retard). “Sarah Palin is fucktard.” Nice, no?
Worst portmanteau of all time: Mangagement ring.
mangina is pretty bad, too.
Bromance
Because I’m still fascinated by this, I found the rules of blending:
# Blends with overlapping (and no other shortening): slanguage < slang + language, sexpert < sex + expert
# Blends with clipping (and no overlapping): fanzine < fan + (maga)zine, smog < sm(oke) + (f)og
# Blends with clipping and overlapping: motel < mot(or) + (h)otel, feminazi < femin(ist) + Nazi
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