Portmanteau Word Blends

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name’s Robert Craddock from La Mesa, and I have a question about a type of word that’s actually a combination of two words.

Oh, yeah?

Yeah, we call them Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup words for lack of a better defined term, and we’re hoping you can maybe give us a clue here.

Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup words.

Yeah, someone shoved chocolate into your peanut butter and you end up with something different than both of them that was really good.

Oh, yeah, yeah, right, right.

You got chocolate in my peanut butter. You got peanut butter in my chocolate.

Do they still run those commercials?

I think it’s just floating around in my mind.

Yeah, mine too. Mine too.

I wonder if, Grant, are you old enough to remember those commercials?

Oh, sure, absolutely.

Okay. Those were like, what, late 70s, early 80s maybe?

Yeah, something like that.

My wife here in La Mesa is out with a group of women, and they’re practicing for a run.

And my wife came up with this term called, for what they’re doing is walkers, meaning that they’re walking and jogging intermittently.

And I wasn’t privy to what she was talking about until she filled me in on the walk part, and then the jogger part came to me.

But I brought the question back to our library and asked my library staff if they knew of a word that describes those kind of combinations for like when biology and chemistry become biochemistry.

And we couldn’t come up with one.

And I guess we could go and research it, but the old saying goes, the cobbler’s kids get no shoes.

We don’t really have time to do our own research. We’re answering questions for other people.

That’s why we emailed you.

So you’re outsourcing your library reference work.

Yes. Keeping it in this country.

Well, we have an answer.

Yes, we do. Actually, we have lots of answers, don’t we?

But I’ll tell you my favorite word for this, Robert, which is portmanteau word.

Portmanteau.

That sounds like a fine postprandial. P-O-R-T-M-A-N-T-E-A-U.

Portmanteau.

And that refers to an old-fashioned stiff suitcase, the kind that is hinged in the middle and opens into two halves.

And then you pack your clothes and you put those two halves back together.

Okay. It’s a word that Lewis Carroll coined.

You know, Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, and Jabberwocky has all those funny words in that poem, Jabberwocky.

Yes, yes. Right.

He called those portmanteau words, which I just love.

I love the image of the suitcase with two halves carrying meaning in either half.

I’d like that too.

Yeah, portmanteau words.

Although they’ve gone by different names, haven’t they, Grant?

Like telescope words.

Right, and in linguistics, we tend to use the more boring term of blend.

Blend.

Yeah, and in linguistics also, we’ve broken them down into multiple kinds of blends.

And I won’t get into the details here, but it’s definitely a phenomenon that’s been examined for 70 or 80 years because this is one of the ways in which we neologize.

It’s more common in the last hundred years than it ever was before that.

It simply wasn’t common to take two words with meaning and put them together.

But it’s cool. Blends are cool. Portmanteau words are cool.

I love, I’m like Martha. I love the fact that Lewis Carroll identified this and felt that it was such a treat for him to do as a writer that he needed to point out to people that it was interesting and that he also created a name for it.

He was a heavy neologizer.

How fun.

So, Robert, take portmanteau back to your staff and see what they make of it.

I will certainly do that.

All right. Thanks for calling, Robert.

Well, thank you both.

Okay. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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