It seems you can’t open a paper or laptop these days without being ambushed by a new portmanteau word. They cover every walk of life: smirting and gaydar, guesstimate and Chunnel, metrosexual, stagflation, glamping, frappuccino and Buffyverse. They were even deemed worthy of their own round in the recent final of Only Connect. We have, I think it’s fair to say, reached peakmanteau.
The appeal of blend words is easy enough to fathom. For one thing, they’re brand spanking new. Aren’t they?
Some have been with us for over half a century: liger (lion + tiger), napalm (naphthenic + palmitic), paratroops (parachute + troops), ginormous (gigantic + enormous), transistor (transfer + resistor), Tollywood (Tollygunge + Hollywood) and telethon (television + marathon). Motel (motor + hotel) dates from 1925, sexpert from 1924. The Baker Street and Waterloo Railway officially changed its name to the Bakerloo Line in 1906. Smog (smoke + fog) is first attested in 1905, brunch (in the UK, not the US, incidentally) in 1896, prissy (prim + sissy) in 1895, electrocute (electricity + execute) in 1889. Lewis Carroll coined chortle (chuckle + snort) and galumph (gallop + triumph) in 1871. Oxbridge (Oxford + Cambridge) was invented by William Makepeace Thackeray in 1849, albeit as a fictional university (there was also a Camford); the sense of both institutions combined is first recorded in 1957. Someone essayed slimsy in 1845, but the world evidently wasn’t ready. Squiggle (squirm + wriggle) seems to have been around since at least 1804. Among other terms that failed to endure are squirearchy (1796), niniversity (1590) and foolosopher (1549 – sorry, Jamiroquai).
Suddenly, portmanteaus don’t seem quite so shiny. Although it is true that they’ve only really come to the fore in the last few years: a trickle in the 1970s and 80s (McDonald’s Hamburglar, The Late Late Breakfast Show’s Mr Puniverse, the Mail on Sunday’s “newspaper, not a snoozepaper” ad campaign) became a steady flow in the 90s (metrosexual, alcopop, malware), and a full-on deluge in the 21st century.
The problem is that the linguistic ground is saturated. The educated English speaker has a vocabulary of about 75,000 words, and already has over 1m to choose from, so only a few droplets of this inundation are likely to sink in.
What’s more, we have effective flood defences; new words have always raised writers’ and grammarians’ hackles. Jonathan Swift took exception to mob and banter. Samuel Johnson saw no need to include civilisation in his Dictionary (civility, he argued, was sufficient), while HW Fowler railed against forceful and racial. And the Inkhorn Controversy of the 16th century, which saw Thomas Wilson and his allies mounting a passionate attack on the surge in “pretentious” borrowings from Latin, rattled on for decades.
So what determines which coinages will endure? Linguists Constantine Lignos and Hilary Prichard of the University of Pennsylvania identified some of the factors at work in 2015.
1 Completion probability/understandability
Can the average speaker quickly recognise the origins of both parts of the word, and thus easily intuit its meaning? If the source words are recognisable (mockney, bromance), the word is in with a chance. If it’s just two words arbitrarily chopped and slapped together (chugger, dunch, groutfit – is that green outfit? Grey outfit? Great outfit? Or some sort of exercise involving bathroom tiles?), it’s probably doomed.
2 Association
Portmanteaus with root words that have some prior relation, or come from the same general domain, are more memorable. This may be why frenemy and staycation have made some headway, and why the otherwise execrable jeggings is still with us.
3 Applicability
Blend words rarely take off if their meanings are too narrow; hence the demise of pedoeuvre, mankle, emberrorist, foodoir and zootique. I am relatively confident, too, in predicting that Bremain will not stay with us for long after the EU referendum.
4 Naturalness/euphony
Does the hybrid word feel English? Does it have the cadences and sound sequences typical of the language – or is it an assault course for the mouth? Root words that share a syllable, or at least a sound, help in this regard. Thus glitterati, gaydar and hacktivism have a shot at immortality; legacyquel, condesplaining, privelobliviousness and gymtimidation, one fervently hopes, do not.
5 Fun factor
Lignos and Prichard found that more explicitly humorous words and words connected with pop culture tended to go down well; sharknado and sheeple were among the winners of their survey.
To these I would add:
6 Uniqueness
Is the result too close in sound or spelling to an existing word? I refer you to Deano’s marvellous speech in the sitcom Gavin and Stacey: “Can I have tea in the bottom half of the mug, and coffee in the top half of the mug, please? I call it toffee. Or cea. But you can’t ask for that in a cafe, cos they just bring you a toffee. Or a key.” Also, turducken.
7 Redundancy
If there’s already a perfectly good word to describe the concept you’re trying to convey, kindly keep your chillax to yourself.
8 Ick factor
Do we really need to hear about this wizard new concept of yours? A surprising number of neologisms are in questionable taste. Feminazi, hasbian and frape are offensive on all sorts of levels, and in an age when most of us are moving away from gender specificity – changing policeman to police officer and fireman to firefighter, substituting gender-neutral they for he – it seems odd to be introducing words like momager, mompreneur and manspreading.
9 Tone
Just as onomatopoeia and reduplications often feel slightly childish, and abbreviations have a whiff of informality about them, so portmanteau words can come across as flippant – like rejected Sun newspaper headlines. (It’s salutary to remember that the most enthusiastic adopters of blend words tend to be politicians and PRs.) If your concept is at all serious or high-minded, you might want to consider something with a little more gravitas, such as a loanword. (Such as gravitas.)
Before you write me off as a member of the bitterati, making snobservations about these linguistic abombinations, I should point out that I love me a good portmanteau. At their best, they’re succinct and witty, and you can tell immediately what they’re driving at.
Moreover, the craze for Frankenwords has had a useful side-effect: the formation of new affixes. When one neologist coined sugarholic on the model of alcoholic in 1965, it suggested that the letter cluster “-aholic” meant “addict (when in fact it’s from “alcohol”, from Arabic “al-kuhul”, “the kohl”, plus the -ic suffix). This allowed the subsequent coinage of workaholic, sexaholic, shopaholic and chocoholic (although curiously, you never hear mention of drugaholics, pornaholics or fagaholics). Similar fates have befallen the -thon of marathon (telethon, snogathon), the -kini of bikini (monokini, mankini, burqini), the -gate of Watergate (Squidgygate, Betsygate, Plebgate), -tastic, -burger and -erati.
But while I can just about live with skort (skirt + short), I can barely bring myself to type athevening. How do you even say it? Does the stress fall on the first syllable, the second, or both? And out of context, how on earth is anyone supposed to know what it means? (For those who can’t bring themselves to click on the link, it’s “athletic + eveningwear”.)
I don’t want an outright ban. All I’m asking for is a little quality control: more buzzwords and fewer bum words.
Do you agree? Do you have a favourite, or least favourite, portmanteau word? Or have you invented one of your own that you’d like to see enter mainstream use? All comtributions gratefully accepted.
Here are a couple of suggestions to get you started:
Agenda-bender Someone who wilfully misinterprets the speaker’s motives
Dadvertising Publicity targeted at fathers
Sargasm Noise communicating the fact that intercourse has been less than satisfactory
Eurosurgeon David Cameron (he wishes)
Gliberal Nick Clegg
Gardenfreude Simple pleasure, such as that derived from horticulture
Cashtration The act of cutting off a person’s funds (thank you @AlixFox!)
Twitter: @AndyBodle