HUMPTY DUMPTY—LINGUIST EXTRAORDINAIRE

EXPLAINING WORDS LIKE “SLITHY” AND “MIMSY” to Alice, Humpty Dumpty says, “You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.” And, of course, Alice would have recognized a portmanteau as “a case or bag for carrying clothing and other belongings when traveling.”

Image from Webster Museum. 

Slithy” is something that’s both slimy and lithe. “Mimsy” is both miserable and flimsy. And these are just two of the portmanteau words (aka blend words) collected here today in celebrating Humpty Dumpty—Linguist Extraordinaire. 

Image by John Tenniel from Through the Looking-Glass via bleedingcool.com.

Others From Mathematician Dodgson. Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky” gave us other portmanteaus, among them “chortle” (as in “chuckle” and “snort”) and “galumphing” (perhaps, Wikipedia notes, “a blend of “galloping” and “triumph”).

“Burbled”, Carroll noted in a letter, could have been a blend of “bleat,” “murmur,” and “warble.” “Frabjous,” credited by the O.E.D., is possibly a blend of “fair,” “fabulous,” and “joyous.”

Firmly Embedded. Other portmanteaus are firmly embedded in English: a motor hotel, an atmospheric blend of smoke and fog, and a sorta breakfast/lunch.  

Kinda Portmanteauesque: When the two words are unchanged in their linking, linguists call them “compounds” not “blends”/“portmanteaus”: applesauce, bagpipe, nothing, sunspot, zigzag.

A Technical One. A binary digit (something of a hodgepodge of both bi/two and digit/ten fingers) gets shortened in computerese to “bit.”

Bark If You’ve Heard These. Cockopoo, Labradoodle, Goldendoodle, and Dorgi (first bred when one of Queen Elizabeth’s Corgis mated with a Dachshund belonging to Princess Margaret).

Geographical Portmanteaus. Befitting their traveling-bag connotations, there’s a wealth of locale portmanteaus, among them Texarkana, Calexico (on the U.S. side) and Mexicali (across the border), and SeaTac (derived from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport).  

An Historical One. SimanaitisSays had “On Gerrymandering,” about the slimy practice of defining boundaries for a political party’s benefit: Eldridge Thomas Gerry, 1744-1814, was the ninth Governor of Massachusetts, 1810–1812. As described in Wikipedia, “In 1812 the state adopted new constitutionally-mandated electoral district boundaries. The Republican-controlled legislature had created district boundaries designed to enhance their party’s control over state and national offices, leading to some oddly shaped legislative districts. Although Gerry was unhappy about the highly partisan districting (according to his son-in-law, he thought it ‘highly disagreeable’), he signed the legislation.”

The term “Gerry-mander” first appeared in the Boston Gazette, March 26, 1812. This image by Elkanah Tisdale.

The “mandering” part came from the meandering nature of this political division.

Foreign Portmanteaus. “Pokémon” derives from pocket monster. “Karaoke” comes from the Japanese kara 空っぽ empty and  ōke ōkesutora, オーケストラ, orchestra.

Velcro comes from the French: velours velvet and crochet hooked. 

Hep Ones. Animagna comes from anime and manga. Mockumentary is a mocking documentary. One I particularly like is nonebrity, from nonentity and celebrity. There are scads of them. 

Sexting derives from sex texting. Staycation is a vacation right at home. Maybe doing both simultaneously is sextcation. 

Maybe you’ll add others. ds 

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024