The Portmanteau Name Trap

If you have had the privilege of naming a product or a solution or coin a new term to add to the lexicon infinite, you would have encountered a familiar friend - the portmanteau. The dictionary defines the portmanteau as a large suitcase and also as a blending in of 2 words. The suitcase should have been enough of a hint of the baggage that such words create.

Lewis Carrol is credited with the popularization of this wonderful word construction technique back in the day when he wrote Alice in Wonderland with words like slithy - combining lithe and sly and mimsy - combining flimsy and miserable. Little did he know that he had created a suitcase monster that allowed any type of luggage combination

Today, portmanteau's are all around us - blog, vog, smog, infomercial, bromance, edutainment and more recently The Grexit! There are even portmanteau generators like https://www.portmanteaur.com/ that can spit out combinations of two or more words, with you just having to choose one that sounds the best and rolls off the tongue easily! The film world also recognizes a portmanteau-style of film making, where multiple stand-alone stories with a common theme like love or loathing are combined into a single film. Films like New Years Day or Valentine's Day are prime examples. Quentin Tarentino's Pulp Fiction brought this style of film making back into style. 

Douglas Coupland's new book, The Age of Earthquakes: A guide to the extreme present invents portmanteau words for the modern condition. In reviewing it, The Independent's Boyd Tonkin adds a few of his own to the mix - frankruptcy, flopaganda, freaquels and this is my favourite - 

chromance - a relationship commenced and then continued with the mutual monitoring of both parties' history and activities on a high-speed browser

Portmanteaus are no longer Avant Garde, they are (sadly) very much an accepted part of the modern condition and seem to rob us of imaginative alternatives.

The other day I watched an ad by a cell phone brand featuring an Australian actor evading his captors with a slim phone - "5 minutes, 5 millimeters, Its simple...no no wait, its SLIMPLE"

I rest my case.