“Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first. Now open your mouth and speak.” — Lewis Carroll in “The Hunting of the Snark”
The resulting word you’ll speak will, hopefully, come out as an understandable portmanteau, or a word that has been made by blending two words together. The term was first applied to words written by Carroll in his 1871 poem “Jabberwocky.”
The word “portmanteau,” which is formed by blending the French words “porter” (to carry) and “manteau” (cloak), existed prior to Carroll’s writing “Jabberwocky” and originally referred to “a case or bag to carry clothing in while traveling, especially a leather trunk or suitcase that opens into two halves.”
In “Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There,” Carroll has Humpty Dumpty explain to Alice that “slithy” is a combination of “slimy” and “lithe,” while “mimsy” is made up of parts for “miserable” and “flimsy.” He then concludes the lesson with, “You see it’s like a portmanteau — there are two meanings packed up into one word.”
Carroll explained the formation of one of his “Jabberwocky” portmanteaus thusly: “If your thoughts incline ever so little towards ‘fuming,’ you will say ‘fuming-furious’; if they turn, by even a hair’s breadth, towards ‘furious,’ you will say ‘furious-fuming’; but if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say ‘frumious,’” which is a word he had used to describe the Bandersnatch.
More recent examples of portmanteau words dot our language. For example, “brunch” is formed by splicing parts of the words “breakfast” and “lunch” together.
Brunch, along with “smog” (smoke and fog), and “spork” (spoon and fork) are common portmanteau words, also known as nonce words — or occasionalisms — which are lexemes created for a single occasion to solve an immediate problem of communication. You know, words like: motel, sitcom, infotainment and telethon.
Portmanteaus are different from compound words such as “ice cream,” “doorknob,” and “mother-in-law,” which could have completely different meanings than the words from which they were coined.
And it doesn’t look like portmanteau words are going to go out of style anytime soon. New words that have recently made it into one or more dictionaries include “cosplay” (costume and play) and “freegan” (free and vegan — or a person who eats only free food, possibly from dumpster diving).
In the past few weeks alone, I’ve caught wind of several new (to me, at least) portmanteau words, including:
“Vog” (volcano and smog);
“Smishing” (SMS and phishing), which is phishing via text;
“Candemic” (can and epidemic), a shortage of beer and soda cans;
“Sansdemic” (sans and epidemic), a shortage of workers;
“Mammophant” (mammoth and elephant), which is an attempt to bring back the wooly mammoth by cross-breeding it with an elephant.
On the other hand, the coinage of witty portmanteaus is hardly a new thing. In his mystifying 1939 novel, “Finnegans Wake,” James Joyce introduces us to several portmanteaus, including: “laysense” (layman and sense), “sinduced” (sin and seduced), and “comeday” (comedy and day).
But my favorite Joycean portmanteau is “fadograph” (fading and photograph), because it brings to mind Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, which slowly fades away until there’s nothing left but its smile.
Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.”
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