User:MacRusgail/War on Portmanteaux
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Making a portmanteau is usually a lazy way of inventing a new word. Some people have done them well, e.g. Jabberwocky which contains lots of them, and they're sometimes even vaguely funny e.g. "Slimnastics", however, a lot of the ones that appear on Wikipedia are, well, just rubbish.
A few of the bad portmanteaux I've tried to get deleted off Wikipedia recently include:
- Bentist (Bent Dentist)
- Nettop (Internet Top - not even a proper one)
- Pincest (?Pin Incest, when multiple pins bridge)
- Scrotasm (Scrotum/Scrotal Orgasm)
And there's plenty more of them.
Making bad portmanteaux is easy; here's a few I made earlier-
- Ameridentidate (American presidential candidate)
- Boach (Baseball/basketball coach)
- Chistralianese (Chinese Australian)
- Kurdaqi (Kurdish Iraqi)
- Skump (Ski jump)
- Yellophone (Yell telephone)
To be fair, they're not all bad. I can even think of some good portmanteaux e.g.
- Digidisk (Digital Disk)
- Eurocrat (European bureaucrat)
- Paralympics (Para-Olympics)
But most are bad and must be stopped!
I hope you'll sign up for the "War on Portmanteaux", it's a lot more bloodless than real wars and worthwhile!
