In his book “Through the Looking Glass”, Lewis Carroll explained this process through the voice of Humpty Dumpty: “You see it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word.” Thus named after a suitcase which opens out into two, these portmanteau words are everywhere in English, from information technology (bit: binary/digit, emoticons: emotion/icon, pixel: picture/element) to the media (edutainment, infomercial, infotainment). They include traditional expressions such as fortnight (fourteen nights) and Goodbye (God be with you) to trendy buzzwords for the way we live now like affluenza (affluence/influenza) and digerati (digital/literati). John Lennon used a portmanteau word to christen his band The Beatles (beat/beetle). You also come across lifestyle terms such as brunch (breakfast/lunch), flexitime and workaholic. You watch news-casts and sitcoms (situation comedies). You read fanzines at the laundromat. You take the Chunnel (Channel tunnel) to study at Oxbridge. We’ve all become netizens, expected to practise perfect netiquette. Medicare costs are humongous. Economists give their guesstimates on stagflation. As you can see, this language’s appetite for verbal sandwiches is literally ginormous.
