Portmanteau: a blend of two or more words into one word
which combines both the sounds and the meaning of both words.
I know Wikipedia is scorned as an academic source, but in this case, it’s completely appropriate to cite them for the figure of speech known as portmanteau. This is because wikipedia IS a portmanteau. (Wiki + encyclopedia.) Get it?!
For something with such an obscure name (I never heard of portmanteau before, have you?) this little literary, multi-faceted blege (blade + edge) on the writer’s Swiss Army Knife of tropes, is quite a handy tool. If you think about it, there are a lot of portmanteaus out there doing some heavy language lifting. I’ll give you a few here to get started, but first I want to pay famage (fan + homage) to its creator.
Lewis Carroll is credited with dubbing portmanteau and using it to great delair (delight + flair) in the Jabberwocky’s poem. But journalists, Kennel Clubs and gossip columnists are having a field day with it, too.
Witness: The Labradoodle…
The SPORK…
Not as adorable as a labradoodle or useful as a spork…
Speidi is also a portmanteau.
Even BLOG is a portmanteau (web + log, shortened to blog.) Why don’t you try it… leave me your best portmanteau in the comments and I’ll feature you in a blog. Extra points for a photo that illustrates it.
