What’s your favorite “portmanteau?”

 

Mine is probably “Trustafarian,” to describe people with trust-funds who dress like hippies and pan-handle for change while parking their SUV around the corner so nobody can see it.

Portmanteau
A portmanteau (plural: portmanteaux) is a term in linguistics that refers to a word or morpheme that fuses two or more grammatical functions. A folk usage of portmanteau refers to a word that is formed by combining both sounds and meanings from two or more words (e.g. ‘animatronics‘ from ‘animation‘ and ‘electronics‘). In linguistics, these folk portmanteaux are called blends. It can also be called a frankenword (incidentally, this is another example of a portmanteau). Typically, portmanteau words are neologisms. In short, it’s a word that combines two words to form a single word. One of the most well-known examples is cyborg, a term which is commonly used to refer to a cybernetic organism.

Etymology

The word was coined by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871). In the book, Humpty Dumpty explains to
Alice words from Jabberwocky, saying, “Well, slithy means lithe and slimy … You see it’s like a portmanteau— there are two meanings packed up into one word.” Carroll often used such words to a humorous effect in his work.“Portmanteau”, from Middle French “porter” (to carry) and “manteau” (a coat or cover), formerly referred to a large travelling bag or suitcase with two compartments, hence the linguistic idea of fusing two words and their meanings into one. “Portmanteau” is rarely used to refer to a suitcase in English any more, since that type of a suitcase has fallen into disuse. In French, the word has the different meaning of “coat rack,” and sometimes “coat hanger,” and is spelled “porte-manteau.” The french word for “Portmanteau” is “mot valise”, which translates literally as “suitcase word”.“Portmanteau word” was the original phrase used to describe such words (as listed in dictionaries published as late as the early 1990s), but this has since been abbreviated to simply “portmanteau” as the term (and the type of words it describes) gained popularity.