A New (to me) Portmanteau
A portmanteau is an old type of suitcase into which you dump a bunch of unrelated stuff. We linguists use the term when we combine parts of unrelated words to make a new word. One example is “infotainment,” a combination of information and entertainment. The tendency in English is to take out the hyphen when the word becomes familiar, and sometimes I still see info-tainment.
Here’s a portmanteau word I ran into for the first time this morning in a Morning Brew article about the Disney company’s 100th anniversary coming up this October. I made it bold so you could spot it more easily:
The result is pragmatism combined with some good old-fashioned fun: The wartime cartoons and print media are infused with patriotic PSAs while staying true to the brand’s comedic quirkiness, making for prime propaganda-tainment. Ultimately, they helped keep the company out of bankruptcy and raised audiences’ spirits during some of history’s darkest hours.
Here’s a link to the original article, which doesn’t contain the portmanteau:
https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/stories/2023/08/10/donald-duck-and-uncle-sam-fought-side-by-side-in-wwii
Of course I have to put in a picture from the article:
So what’s a portmanteau word that you like?
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