Portmanteau Portmanteau
Is there something about the word Portmanteau? I’m already confident that there’s something fun & catchy about combining words, but I wonder if the fun factor of the term ‘Portmanteau’ (port-man-toh), cleverly re-coined by Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland, has any impact on the adoption. I’m constantly evangelizing portmanteau, and often people have never heard of the term, or even that word combining had its own term. Sometimes the word combination catches attention, but other times, during my explanations, the term portmanteau is what piques curiosity. I think it’s fun to say, and despite the un-phonetic (is that a word?) spelling, it rolls off the tongue. Lewis Carroll, in his classic story, successfully identified a fun existing word and redefined it with a more exciting definition - he identefined (identified + defined) Portmanteau. I seem to be unable to stop myself from creating combinations that use ‘portmanteau’ as one of the wordponents (word components), so let’s explore this ridiculousness a bit more in depth.
As I portranteau (rant about portmanteau), I frequently come up with categories for them, and these categories are often portmanteau portmanteaux. An example of a portmanteau category is Sportmanteaux - portmanteaux about sports, and a perfect portmanteau, I might add. Want some more examples? Well, blog writing is not interactive enough to hear your response, so I hope you said/thought yes! Pitchuation - a pitching situation (baseball). Fanterference - fan interference, when a fan reaches onto the field to mess up a play (baseball). Runbelievable - an unbelievable run (football). You get the point - I like this category.
Although the title of this post is not a word combination, portmanteau portmanteau is a category - word combinations where one of the wordponenets is ‘portmanteau.’ Another category is acronymteau (or portmancronym) - a combination of two acronyms. The television channel MSNBC, I believe, is a combination of MS (Microsoft acronym) and NBC (National Broadcasting Company). Upon further review (read: overthinking it), MSNBC, as I just defined it, is really more accurately defined as a compound word version of an acronym, rather than a true word combination (or acronymteau). However, if MSN stood for Microsoft Network, it would fit my definition. Yes, I am a word nerdy enough to have a Sportmancronym: ESPNFL - watching the National Football League on the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network. One more quick example - Phrasemanteau (such as ‘cream of the crap’ - the best of the word)…but I’ve already posted about that. These may or may not count as categories, but also like to use Poormanteau, a poor combination of two words, and Portmanyteau, a combination of more than two words, such as turducken (turkey + duck + chicken). Beware of Portmantoverload…
Writer’s Blog & Phrasemanteau
As I’ve been frequently admitting, I haven’t posted very often lately - I have what’s known as Writer’s Blog (writer’s block + blog). My question is this - is Writer’s Blog a portmanteau? Technically, since Blog is a combination of Web & Log, I could probably get away with it. But my actual question, or point (yes, I do have one), is the Phrasemanteau. I am coining Phrasemanteau to mean a combination of two phrases. However, as I look at some of my recent phrasemanteaux, I’m noticing they seem to consistently be a combination of ONE phrase and one other random word. Let’s look at a few, and try to decide if these are truly phrasemanteaux.
First, my favorite - Cream of the Crap. Wordponents (or phraseponents) are Cream of the Crop, and, well, Crap. Definition - the best of the worst. I love when I get a chance to use this term. But is it a phrasemanteau? It’s combining only phrase, and one word. Well, according to my original definition (combination of two phrases), probably not. I’d like these even more if they contained a portmanteau. Meaning, Cream of the Crap has all normal words, and no combos…so maybe I’d be more lenient definition-wise if it had some portmaneaux.
Agriculture Shock - a shock to agriculture, a combination of agriculture and culture shock. This one I came up with the (potential) phrasemanteau first, then gave it a definition. I think there was some Agriculture Shock down in Florida pretty recently…termed the “Florida Freeze” in the Wall Street Journal article. According to the article, quite a few fruits were impacted, quite a noticable shock to the agriculture. But back to the question at hand, is agriculture shock just a phrase of it’s own?? Considering the definition, it could be considered a shock to the agriculture. I also believe that the existence of “culture shock” as a phrase DOES help the catchiness of “agriculture shock.” Quite the debate…so I’ll just avoid weighing in for now.
Last, but not least, a shout-out to my blogging neighbor. Welcome to a new blog - A Change Of Eatery - a blog about Connecticuisine and events in the Hartford area. Anyway, back to word combusiness. The name of the blog is a combination of “a change of scenery” and “eatery.” If I were to force a regular portmanteau into the name, it would wind up as “a change of sceatery.” Frankly, not nearly as cool & catchy of a name. This is one of those tough realizations for me, when a phrase without a portmanteau sounds better than with. Perhaps I can rationalize preferring A Change of Eatery by declaring it a Phrasemanteau.
Honestly, I don’t know if any of these are actually phrasemanteau, but since I don’t have any better examples, these will suffice. If these are just cool phrases, then great. Phrasemanteau is in the eye of the beholder, and these sound fun to me!
Dusting off the Blogwebs
Time to dust off the blogwebs (blog + cobwebs). Before I get going, I need to call out the latest Bud Light commercials for their impressive portmanteaux usage. Their “Tailgate Tested, Tailgate Approved” commercials have a Billy Mays-esque fake infomercial star peddling items such as the Grooler, a combination Grill and Cooler; and the Foozie, a Foam #1 Finger crossed with a Koozie beer holder/insulator. Is it Koozie or Coozie? After googling that questions, I’ve decided the internet is divided. A friend of mine recently posted on the Facebook group asking if I was upset at Allstate insurance for using “Homauto” in a commercial, a combination of Home & Auto insurance. I feel the opposite - similar to the Grooler and Foozie, I love when any portmanteaux are used in marketing.
As you may have noticed in some previous posts, some of my favorite situations are when people are trying to find the best possible combination of two words. Sometime last week, someone wrote a “request” on my whiteboard at work asking for a portmanteau that meant a “male turkey.” I came up with Turkhe (pronounced Turk-He), and someone else had Malurkey, which sounds undisturbingly close to malarkey, which is an all-around fun word. In fact, I challenge you to use the word “malarkey” casually in conversation - if you can get away with it without anyone commenting…you’re good. I don’t think either are fantastic new words, but they’ll do the trick. Your ideas for a better combo are welcome, but then again, any portmanteau people want to share is pretty ridiculously welcome in my book. You might say, my book of portmanteau is always in need of some new content and some new authors.
In addition to the occasional word combo challenge, I also like debating the best combination of polycombinable (okay, I made that word up, and am attempting to sell it as meaning “multiple ways of combining”) words. One of my pasts (past + posts), Combeernation, told a word debate story around Sam Adams Summer Ale - was it Sameasonal? Samsonal? Smeasonal? Sammer Ale? I think healthy debate creates the best words, and here’s why: My method of word combining is frequently a display of verbal or mental diarrhea. Basically, I always run a bunch of possible combinoptions (combination + options) through my head, occasionally verbalizing them as I go. As part of this insanity, if I don’t think of a comfortable combination (meaning, the words flow into each other), I’ll start to incorporate synonyms of the wordponents into the process. For example, if I’m trying to combine “horse” and “rider” - after deciding horsider and ridorse are awful, I’d try using “equine” as a replacement for “horse.” I’d land on equider as the perfect combination. But there is no perfect combination, even if the words fit together perfectly - word combining and word preferences are subjective, and that’s what keeps them fun.
I’ll try to post a bit more frequently, but in the meantime you can sign up to receive email updates when I post.
Why Combine?
Wow - it’s been quite awhile since my last post! I’ve been decently distracted by two things: First, I became an uncle, and my newphew (new nephew) is freaking awesome. Second, I’ve been putting a bit more focus on finalizing requirements for the website, Wocky Words, where you’ll be able to submit and rank portmanteaux that you (and others) create, so that’s also been taking a good chunk of time. I’ll try to maintain a slow & steady posting frequency, but I definitely want to make sure I get Wocky Words up and running - I can’t wait until there’s a place for people to share word combinations, but I want the site to have plenty of funtionality (fun functionality) before going live.
Back to “business” - why combine? For me, it’s fun. I like doing it - and occasionally, it borders on creativity. I prefer to ask “Why not create a new word?” Usually, I don’t get many answers to this question, but recently I received one. A co-worker said to me - my kids are always coming home with new slang words - things with no legitimate meanings - and using them in daily life. She told me that her mother had taught her the English language properly, and expected her to use it properly. She, in turn, would teach & enforce proper English in her children. No child of hers would be saying ‘axe’ instead of ‘ask’, nor would they be writing ‘alot’ instead of ‘a lot.’
How could I blame this person for teaching her children well? I didn’t - I had to respect that. But next, she began to compare using word combinations to using slang or mispronunciations like ‘axe.’ Well - ‘alot’ would’ve been a better argument, since it’s at least (theoretically) a word combo. I’ve already blogged about my aversion to portmantignorance - if you will combine words, please do so out of creativity, fun, syllable-saving, or even pure cheesiness (as I often do), but do not create them because you thought they were a single word.
Aaaanyway, as I mentioned, I understand the desire to teach English according to Websters, but I also don’t believe English should be a stale language (stalanguage?). Perhaps becoming stale was the downfall of Latin? Who knows?? Certainly not me! But if you don’t believe me about the evolution of English (evolanguage?), ask our old friends Merriam and Webster, who add several words to the dictionary each year - including Staycation!
The moral here is - PLEASE teach your kids proper English - PLEASE teach them ‘a lot’ and ‘ask,’ if for no other reason than to help them get jobs and sound more eloquent. But also let them be creative, get outside the box, and appreciate Slanguage and the evolution of our words - and be sure to explain to them when it is and is not appropriate to use them.
Portmanteau Perfection
What is portmanteau perfection? So far - nothing…but hopefully I can give some meaning to the term. I am proposing that if a word combination includes all letters of both wordponents, it is a “Perfect Portmanteau.” Let me give a few examples to help clarify: Freevent (a free event), Sparea (a spare area), Simplementation (a simple implementation), Peanutella (a mixture of peanut butter and Nutella), and Betiquette (etiquette of placing a bet) are all perfect portmanteaux. These are all fairly straightforward combinations, but what happens when the line between perfect and imperfect portmanteaux blends?
Consider for a moment the portmanteau Thrivalry (a thriving rivalry, usually in sports). Please pardon the portmanteaux pretentiousness (mmm, alliteration), but I really like this sportmanteau. So, is it a perfect portmanteau? Well, let’s check the wordponents - Thrive and Rivalry. Actually, that’s bringing up another issue - is it the root of the wordponent, or the wordponent itself (thrive versus thriving) that we are checking for perfection? Am I supposed to be answering these questions, or just posing them? I think the modus operandi so far has been to pose the questions, then suggest what I think the answer should be. I do want to be really clear that I’m interested in what YOU think here, because I definitely don’t have all the answers. Since creating portmanteaux is my hobby (and meant to be fun and inclusive), I think everybody is entitled to their own answers. Anyway, I consider Thrivalry a combo of Thrive and Rivalry, but I definitely understand viewing it as Thriving + Rivalry. Assuming “thrive” is the wordponent, the portmanteau does not have the letter ‘e’ so it may not be perfect.
To be honest, I really want to declare Thrivalry a perfect portmanteau. What the heck - it’s perfect. Please argue if you disagree. This debate may come down to oral versus written perfection. It may be unfair to call this a debate, since really I’m sparking it now, and nobody is arguing, but I digress. Thrivalry is an example of an orally perfect portmanteau because when spoken, it sounds like both wordponents are fully represented. Here are a couple more examples - Marketecture (a blend of marketing and architecture), Broadience (a broad audience), and Funyons (the brand of chips who finally made onions fun). I’m doing my best here to avoid starting another rant on why they should be called Funions instead. Interesting “factoid” from the Wikipedia (wiki + encyclopedia) article - they originally wanted to call the product OnYums, another portmanteau, but the name was already taken.
Well, I think it’s clear that there can be plenty of debate around the perfection of portmanteaux, and that’s without even touching on the fact that some may argue that portmanteau perfection is a world where the evolution of language occurs through word combination. I’ll leave you with this word - Seagullible. Obviously this means a gullible seagull, but how often can this term really be used?? In my opinion, Thrivalry and many other almost perfect portmanteaux are more perfect than Seagullible. What do you think?
What’s Wrong With ‘W’
It’s become a reality lately that I have some significant beef with the letter ‘w’. I know it sounds ridiculous, but hear me out. First of all, ‘W’ is the longest letter in the alphabet at a whopping 3 syllables. Not only are there no other 3 syllable letters, but there aren’t even any 2 syllable letters. Yes - every single letter is also a single syllable, except for that pesky ‘w’. Why does ‘w’ think it is so special? So deserving of tripling the syllables of any other letter? Nothing. To warrant an unfair share of the alphabet song? Nothing.
As I’ve stated in previous posts, although portmanteaux are the most interesting syllable saving / speech consolidation method, others can also be good, such as acronyms. But look what happens when ‘w’ is brought into acronyms. Compare the syllable counts of the phrase “World Wide Web” (3) compared to the syllable count of the commonly used acronym - “WWW” (9). As you can see, the WWW acronym blatantly takes longer to say, even if you (as many people do) trim down ‘double u” to syllablically slimmer “dub-u” (2). Since I very rarely encounter 4 syllable ‘w’ words, using ‘w’ in an acronym is almost always counter-productive.
The strikes against ‘w’ continue - I was recently informed that in Czech, the letter is actually “double v” instead. Well wait a minute, the “double u”s that I am writing right now look more like a “double v” also. It really makes you wonder, who was it that loved the letter ‘u’ so much that they declared a second letter by squishing (letter combining???) two of them together? Yes, I do realize that is not how our letters were formed/named, but it has made me wonder about the details about how that really did happen. I think until now I’ve accepted that English is a linguistic decendant of Latin, but that’s really as the extent of my knowledge. Maybe I’ll look into this for a future post, but I’m confident I won’t find anything that makes me rethink my staunch opposition to the name of the letter ‘w’.
Okay, it is difficult to come up with some concrete evidence that definitively disproves the value of “double u” as a letter name, but let me at least make one comparison. In the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, Gladwell talks about the correlation between cultures who are traditionally good at math and where the words in their language for numbers are very short. He gives some examples of languages where all numbers (1-10) are 1 syllable, unlike English, where Seven is sort of the ‘w’ of the single digits weighing in at 2 syllables. Often, in the languages of the “strong math” cultures, as numbers reached the teens and hundreds, the syllables needed to say them does not increase as rapidly as in English (e.g., 175 = One-hun-dred-and-sev-en-ty-five). Anyway, Gladwell (or some piece of evidence that he found) made the claim that the shorter syllable count of the numbers, the more numbers people were able to remember. Being able to efficiently remember more numbers had various other positive impacts, such as initial positive psychiatric associations with math, leading to sustained interest in mathematics. Without much backup, I would like to simply propose that the same may be true of language, where if we simplify our letters (likely both in terms of syllable count and pronunciation), people may have higher language aptitude and maintain interest in understanding language.
Just to be clear, I have no problems with the look of the ‘w’ or it’s sound. In fact, I am quite a ‘w’ fan, except for the name “double u.” I know what you are thinking - how can I rant about this without proposing an alternative? Well, fear not, I have one, but I’m still open to suggestions. I propose renaming the letter “double u” to “wuh” - pronounced like the word “wool” without the ‘l’ - is that clear? It would get it down to one syllable, and the name of the letter would finally match the pronunciation. I didn’t mention this, but ‘w’ is also the only letter whose name does not even hint at how it is pronounced. So please, spread the word on the inefficiency of ‘w’ acronyms, and help support genuine syllable saving. Wuh!
Combineability & Syllable Saving
I’ve been wondering lately how to measure combineability of words. When I was talking about the word combination website I’m building, Wocky Words, my friend asked me a question I hadn’t considered in quite awhile. I was rambling about the rating features of the site, where you can use a 5-star scale to rate submitted portmanteaux. Anyway, he asked me about how the words themselves are rated, and he reminded me that the 1-5 scale will be useful for measuring opinions of the portmanteau, but the portmanteaux will also have characteristics of its own. I’ll elaborate, but I can’t promise it will be extremely clear.
The first portmanteaux rating we talked about was Syllables Saved. Consider Brunch, a 1-syllable portmanteau which combines a 1-syllable wordponent with a 2-syllable wordponent. For Brunch, the Syllables Saved would be 2. Or is it? I might have to say “Breakfast and Lunch” or “Breakfast slash Lunch” if I wanted to decribe this meal (in an awful, awful portmanteau-free world), so if you include the filler word, the Syllables Saved could be 3. Perhaps it’s best to keep it simple and just compare the portmanteau to the sum of its wordponents, and here’s why: I just started thinking how many syllables are in “A meal with some breakfast food and some lunch food” (11) and how it may only be fair to compare Brunch to that entire definition, if that’s how I would describe the same situation. Clearly I’ve overthought this.
One of the comments on my last post touched on this - sometimes a portmanteau barely has any Syllables Saved, such as Grailocation, Stealeverage (Steal + Leverage), Snowindy (Snowy + Windy). In looking through my list for some examples, it took quite awhile to find Stealeverage and Snowindy, which I like to think indicates my portmanteaux have a high syllable savings factor. In fact, snowindy doesn’t technically fit that structure, because the ‘y’ in Snowy is actually a saved syllable. Maybe if people just slurred their speech a ton it would make portmanteaux irrelevant.
There are plenty of other portmanteau characteristics to talk about, but it’s late so I’ll save those for another time. Except for this one - combineability sounds like it refers more to the wordponents than to the portmanteau. From a portmanteau perspective, it could be defined as “how easily this word fits into other words.” I’ll leave the details for another post.
While saving syllables is always nice, and is the foundation for word combining, my favorite portmanteaux are those that can pair syllable savings with comprehendability (spellchecker disagrees with this word, so I’ll declare it a portmanteau of comprehend and ability).
To Combine Or Not To Combine
As a self-professed addict to the “art” of word combination, it’s very difficult to accept when two words just are not meant to be combined. One example is Peanut Butter & Jelly. Peanut Belly - no thank you. Jellnut Butter - gross sounding. Peanully Butter, Peanut Jetter? Nothing that comes close to the classic acronym (classicronym) of PB&J. I guess I can accept that portmanteaux must share the word consolidation/phrase shortening/nicknaming world with other things such as acronyms. A portmanteaux realization: acronyms are good to use and can save time, but when we use tons of them, they get hard to understand and keep track of. The same may be true of portmanteaux. I’ve always thought of portmanteaux as a way to remember things, creating new words from existing words, but I’m sure sometimes they make things harder to understand.
When I think of word combinations, usually it’s in context - I’ll use a pair of words and they sound like a good fit, then I blurt out some silly sounding word. Example: The Da Vince Code movie is on in the background while I’m typing this, and someone just said “Grail location” and I immediately blurted out “Grailocation” in my head. When that happens, I usually feel like it’s easier to understand, rather than more complicated. Like learning any new word, there’s obviously some learning curve, but I’m definitely curious how easy/difficult it is to incorporate a portmanteau word versus a normal word. Or is it only fair to compare the comprehendability (hooray for 7 syllable words the spellchecker disagrees with) of a portmanteau to learning two words equivalent to the wordponents (word components)? I don’t really know, but I was recently talking to someone who might.
One of my co-workers introduced me to his wife, who is a professor in the Psych department at Wesleyan. My co-worker and I went out to the campus in Middletown to check out the lab of Barbara Juhasz. She showed me some of her lab equipment: the comprehension-speed computer quizzes, the word frequency lookup programs (to determine equivalent words), and coolest of all, the eye tracker. The eye tracker basically tracked where your eyes are looking, and how much time is spent looking at each piece of the sentence, and was detailed enough to collect reading comprehension data down to the letter.
Anyway, one of the major experiments that Barbara was working on was testing how easily people incorporate compound words into their vocabulary as compared to the non-compound versions. Can a person read “sleep walk” or “sleepwalk” more quickly? This was a couple of months back, but I think another part of the experiment was measuring how quickly people could comprehend new words if they were compounded. For example, not only was she testing if people could read parkinglot faster than parking lot, but also how easily people could understand and incorporate brand new vocabulary if they were new compound words made from more common words. I must say, extremely cool experiments!
Seeing as portmanteaux, at least in my fairly biased opinion, are an evolution of compound words, where rather than just removing the space between words, we actually just fuse the words together. The development of language in the past has often combined words, so I propose we recognize and enjoy that. So, I guess it’s clear that I’m suggesting that portmanteaux are one way of evolving language, but I’m also excited to think that it’s possible to actually measure how easy/difficult it is to understand & incorporate portmanteaux.
An experiment could be developed to answer the (soon to be) age old question - to combine or not to combine?
Random Ranting and Wordiculousness
As I sat here pondering the great question of my new blobby (blog hobby) – “to blog or not to blog” – my old friend Taco Bell came through with some coconut-flavored inspiration. Their most recent commercial, blaring the piña colada song in the background, instructed me to “take a breakation” (break + vacation) with their new piña colada Fruitista Freeze. While I’m not rushing out to try one of those (actually it sounded fairly gross), I have to appreciate the portmanteau factor. If you remember, a few years back T-Bell also had a commercial where they were debating if one of their latest creations was chewy, cheesy, or crunchy, and they decided on “Cruncheweesy.” Upon further inspection of breakation, it’s sort of a portmanteau version of a double negative…like taking a break from a vacation, better known as working.
I’ll get off my portmanteau ranting for a just a minute. If you know me, you know I’ll be immediately back on topic, since I can only go like 14.27 seconds without word combining. On the blog front, I’m happy to say I’ve got a few comments, and I just added this Share/Save button thing that appears at the bottom of every post. It basically is just an easy way for people to link to my posts on lots of social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.) – not too shabby. Now all I have to do is write something interesting enough that people will want to link to it. (hint hint)
As mentioned in my first post, I’m starting a website dedicated to the creation of word combinations. Even though the site is still in development. I’ve started getting into the marketing/advertising stuff, both putting ads on my site, as well as marketing the site. I’ve got some decent ideas around marketing the site which I’ll ramble about at a later date, but I want to quickly rant on the idea of having advertising on the site. When designing the site, we totally ignored where advertising would fit - the classic “if I can’t see you, you can’t see me” approach to planning. It really comes down to that I don’t care very much about making money on the site, since I’m way more interested in simply creating a means to spread this particular brand of word nerdiness. But at the same time, making a few bucks off the site, and the site funding its own development, certainly wouldn’t hurt. So the big question becomes – how do you put advertising on the site without it being obtrusive and annoying? I’ll leave that to others to answer…there’s probably a million answers floating around the blogosphere (blog + atmosphere). Technically blogosphere could be considered a tiered portmanteau: blogosphere = [(web + log) + atmosphere].
The portmanteaux theory section o f my brain has taken over – is blogosphere technically a portmanteau? It brings up an interesting point, which I’ll save for another post, but if blogosphere counts, there are lots of suffixes that create portmanteaux, such as –athon (telethon – telephone marathon, Toyotathon – Toyota marathon). The reality is I may just be associating marathon (and atmosphere) with the suffixes, completely invalidating these as portmanteaux. On the bright side, this is the blog for debating this type of insanity.
Attack of the Portmanteau
Just when you thought it was safe, portmanteaux are now attacking us left and right, specifically via marketing. More specifically, radio and tv marketing. I have a million examples, but yesterday there was a really strange occurrence. One that could shake the very foundation of the non-word-combining world. Or just a big coincidence. On TV, there were three, yes, three commercials in a row that used portmanteaux. The first was a Snickers commercial, which first used Chewpitor (Chew + Jupitor), and then used Patrick Chewing (Chew + Ewing). Personally, I think most of the Snickers portmanteaux aren’t very creative, but the same is true for many of mine, and some of theirs are good (such as Chewtopia - Chew + Utopia). I must point out that it is pretty cool that Snickers has an entire ad campaign focused on portmanteaux.
The next commercial was for Dunkin Donuts. It commented on how eating breakfast at Dunkin won’t break the bank…after all it’s breakfast, not brokefast (broke + breakfast). Once again, not the greatest portmanteau in the world, but it still gets your attention. Dunkin Donuts has also used a few portmanteaux in past advertising, including Fratalian (French + Italian). That was a fairly annoying commercial, but once again: catchy. In talking about the sizes at the fancier coffee shops, they asked “Is it French or is it Italian…perhaps Fratalian?”
It caught my attention to hear two commercials with portmanteaux in a row (a portmanrow???), but then came the third - for DirecTV. They were making fun of a cable company, showing the cable executives participating in a boardroom activity called Blamestorming (Blame + Brainstorming). Essentially a brainstorming session where blaming takes place instead of ideating. Pretty fantastic.
In other news, I was challenged via Facebook to write a post consisting entirely of portmanteaux. It will definitely be challenging, and definitely a short post, but one of these days I’ll give it a try. In the meantime, feel free to post comments entirely in portmanteaux. I nerdily would like to call portmanteaux comments “Commenteaux” - specifically to avoid any confusion with Commanteaux, my term for Common portmanteaux such as brunch, smog, guesstimate, or chortle. Maybe the common ones should be called Commonteaux instead? Actually I’m just happy to have a place to rant about such ridiculous things as Commonteaux vs. Commanteaux vs. Commonteaux.
As you may have noticed, I also updated the look and feel of the site - hopefully it’s a bit more pleasant on the eyes.
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