Portmanteau

A portmanteau (plural: portmanteaus or portmanteaux) is a term in linguistics that refers to a word or morpheme that fuses two or more grammatical functions. A folk usage of portmanteau refers to a word that is formed by combining both sounds and meanings from two or more words (e.g. 'animatronics' from 'animation' and 'electronics'). In linguistics, these folk portmanteaux are called blends. Typically, portmanteau words are neologisms.

Etymology

The word was coined by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), in which it is likened to the French word "porte-manteau" for coat-rack. In the book, Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice words from Jabberwocky, saying, "Well, slithy means lithe and slimy ... You see it's like a portmanteau— there are two meanings packed up into one word." Carroll often used such words to a humorous effect in his work.

In modern French, a "porte-manteau" (from "manteau" (coat) and the verb "porter", to carry) is a coat rack. The English meaning of the word, however, is a suitcase with two compartments – hence the linguistic idea of fusing two words and their meanings into one (of which the modern French version is an appropriate example). "Portmanteau" is rarely used to refer to a suitcase in English any more, since that type of a suitcase has fallen into disuse.

"Portmanteau word" was the original phrase used to describe such words (as listed in dictionaries published as late as the early 1990s), but this has since been abbreviated to simply "portmanteau" as the term (and the type of words it describes) gained popularity.

General summary

A portmanteau morpheme is a morpheme that fuses two grammatical categories (see Fusional language). The classical example of such a morpheme in English is the verbal suffix -s. This particular suffix carries (i.e., ports) at least four distinct inflectional meanings and imparts each of these onto the verb's meaning:

Singular (number)
Third-person (perspective)
Present (tense)
Indicative (mood)

Spanish verb suffixes are also exceptionally fusional, with very many portmanteaux in the Spanish inflectional system.

A portmanteau word is a word that fuses two function words. This use overlaps a bit with the folk term contraction, but linguists tend to avoid using the latter. Example: In French, à + les becomes aux (), a single indivisible word that contains both meanings.

Outside linguistics, the words that are called blends are popularly labeled portmanteaux. The term portmanteau is used in a different, yet still not clearly defined sense, to refer to a blending of the parts of two or more words (generally the first part of one word and the ending of a second word) to combine their meanings into a single neologism. One of the more famous portmanteaux in postmodern Continental philosophy is différance. Coined by Jacques Derrida, différance is a term that combines the terms to differ and to defer (in the Saussurean sense) to describe the fractured and eternally-signifying character of language (see deconstruction).

Recently many magazines and television programs such as US Weekly, People Magazine, Entertainment Tonight, and Access Hollywood use portmanteaux of the names of celebrity couples. The original was "Bennifer" (originally for Ben Affleck and Jennifer López, later revived as "Bennifer 2" or "Bennifer Jr." for Affleck and Jennifer Garner, who are now married); other widely used names include Tomkat (for Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes), Brangelina (for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie), Vaughniston (for Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston), and Filliam H. Muffman (for William H. Macy and Felicity Huffman). In politics, "Billary" was used during the early years of President Bill Clinton's administration regarding the active role played by Hillary Rodham Clinton.^*

Many TV shows' fans tend to do this with the names of their favorite couples like "Luby" for Abby Lockhart and Luka Kovac from ER, "Clois" for Lois Lane and Clark Kent from Smallville, "Spuffy" for Buffy and Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or in The Office "Ram" for Pam and Roy, "R. Kelly" for Ryan and Kelly, "Jam" for Jim and Pam and "Dwangela" for Dwight and Angela. This also happens in other fandoms, such as the Harry Potter fandom with "Harmony" for Harry and Hermione or "Heron" for Hermione and Ron, or even "Dramione" for Draco and Hermione.

Blend is a term used in linguistics to describe the formation of a word from parts (often but not necessarily morphemes) of two other words. Outside linguistics, this type of word formation is called portmanteau.

James Joyce used blends extensively in Finnegans Wake. Many corporate brand names, trademarks, and initiatives, as well as names of corporations and organizations themselves, are blends. For wont of a better example, Wikipedia is a blend made from wiki and encyclopedia, and Wiktionary, one of Wikipedia's sister projects, is a blend of wiki and dictionary. Elsewhere, Nabisco is a blend of the initial syllables of National Biscuit Company. Blended names were used extensively in the merged Marvel/DC continuity of the Amalgam Comics universe. Common names of chemical substances are also often blended versions of the full name, like acetominophen (Tylenol), which is short for p-acetylaminophenol.

Formation

Most blends are formed by one of the following methods:

Part of the sounds of both components are mixed in a "creative" way, mostly preserving their order, such as slithy, a blend of lithe and slimy. This method was preferred by Lewis Carroll but is not much in use otherwise.
The beginning of one word is prepended to the end of the other, e.g., breakfast + lunch = brunch. Sometimes the letter/sound at the boundary is common to both components, e.g., smoke + fog = smog. This is the most common method of blending.
Both components contain a common sequence of letters or sounds. The blend is composed of the beginning of the first component, the common part and the end of the second component. This is a less frequent kind of blend. For example, the word Californication, popularized by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, sounds as if it were California + fornication.
Some languages, like Japanese, encourage the shortening and merging of borrowed foreign words (as in gairaigo), because they are long or difficult to pronounce in the target language. For example, karaoke, a combination of the Japanese word kara (meaning empty) and the clipped form oke of the English loanword "orchestra" (J. ōkesutora オーケストラ), is a Japanese blend that has entered the English language. (From the article gairaigo.)
Engineers will often attempt to make a design more efficient by combining the functions of one or more elements into a single element. Some examples include the stabilator, ruddervators, sprotors, and proprotor. Though practice is common in the aviation industry, it is not limited to that field.

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Etymology

General summary

Formation

See also