Short shot #21: portmanteau crop

I don’t collect all the  examples of portmanteau words that come past me, but I do try to note ones that strike me as having special interest (general discussion, with some examples, here and here).

The November 16 New Yorker has a couple: the Frillies for the Phillies, and the German Ostalgie.

Frillies is a combination of frilly and Phillies (the Philadelphia Phillies, the city’s major-league baseball team). The portmanteau comes to us from the New York Post, chortling over the New York Yankees’ win over the Phillies in this year’s World Series and mocking the Phillies with the feminine frilly, using a classic tactic in male-on-male insult, feminizing the object of the insult. (Ian Parker, “Perfect Paper”, p. 23)

Ostalgie, combining Ost ‘East” and Nostalgie ‘nostalgia’, is a neologism referring to “the pining of some East Germans for their simpler, cozier former lives under state socialism” (George Packer, “November 9th”, p. 22).

Now one that works in both French and English: fauxteur. According to Michael Quinion in World Wide Words #661, 10/17/09:

The Urban Dictionary defines it as “A filmmaker, usually a director, who makes cheesy, derivative, or unoriginal movies.” So it’s clearly a combination of “faux” and “auteur”. It has been around at least since 2005. The New York Times suggested in 2006 that it was a coinage of the Web site defamer.com.

Finally, one I heard on NPR a few days ago, though it seems it’s been around for a while: cyberchondria (cyber- + hypochondria). Lots of ghits for this one. Here’s a brief discussion from a NYT piece by John Markoff, “Microsoft Examines Causes of Cyberchondria” (11/24/08):

On Monday, Microsoft researchers published the results of a study of health-related Web searches on popular search engines as well as a survey of the company’s employees.

The study suggests that self-diagnosis by search engine frequently leads Web searchers to conclude the worst about what ails them.

Well, not finally. Cyberchrondria suggested to me that cyberteria might be out there as well, and indeed it is, in several senses. It can refer to an internet café, to a commercial site offering a range of audio/visual or other electronic equipment, to the panoply of material available on the web, and no doubt many other things. A versatile neologism.

Meme hybrid alert

Although in my posting on portmanteaus I declared that I wasn’t collecting them — there are just too many, and new ones are invented every day — here’s what I think is an interesting new one, from Virginia Heffernan’s NYT Magazine piece (of August 23) “The Feminist Hawks”:

Like many conservatives, [David] Horowitz appears to have come to feminist-hawkism after 9/11. But in his hands, the ideology has fast became a tenacious memebrid — as Tim Hwang, a sociologist and the director of the Web Ecology Project, calls memes that unite two or more cultural phenomena.

“The neat marriage of hawkish tendencies and feminist framing of issues does this quite effectively,” Hwang explained to me in an e-mail message. Borrowing left-wing shibboleths is one way that “conservative ideas can make it big in a generally more liberal online social sphere,” he wrote. Furthermore, to depict Islamic regimes less as terrorists than as repressors of civil liberties may appeal even to traditional isolationists, as it “plays off of the strong communities of libertarians that dominate some prominent spaces.”

Now memebrid is a portmanteau, a kind of hybrid, but the memebrid in question, feminist hawk ‘hawk who is a feminist’, is not. Instead, it’s an instance of a different scheme for combining two words to make a new word: compounding. (The OED entry for portmanteau makes the connection between the two phenomena explicit.) A compound has a dual nature: it is a word, but it also consists of two words in sequence; it has an internal structure.

In some portmanteaus, one of the contributing words appears intact (and the other appears only in abbreviated form); this is the case for memebrid, where meme appears intact, while hybrid is shortened to -brid. But many portmanteaus — brunch, spork — have both contributing words abbreviated (br- + -unch, sp- + -ork).

Still other portmanteaus have both contributors intact, but overlapping: bromance is bro + romance, with -ro- shared (in pronunciation and in spelling); the corresponding compound would be bro romance. In fact, there’s often overlapping in portmanteaus in general: Billary is Bill + Hillary, with shared -ill-; Scalito is Scalia + Alito, with shared -ali-. (Overlapping is a property these portmanteaus have in common with one large class of inadvertent blends, called “splice blends” in the literature: originary is original + ordinary, with shared -in-.)

No overlapping in memebrid, however.