`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
-JABBERWOCKY
Lewis Carroll
(from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872)
Remember reading Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky for the first time? How the words felt foreign but familiar all at once? You immediately made sense of what seemed completely nonsensical.
You hear “slithy” and know it is something between lithe and slimy, “mimsy” is both flimsy and miserable, “galumphing” is galloping while triumphant and “chortling,” is chuckling and snorting at the same time. By simply blending 2 words into a new one, Carrol introduced the world to an entirely new vernacular in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. We call these blended words portamanteaus… and, today, we create and use them everywhere. Tabloids turn celebrity couples like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie into Brangelina. New technologies birth words like netiquette, sexting and textpectation almost daily. Master chefs push the boundaries of fusion cuisine with frankenfoods. Authors like Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner explain hidden causality in the theory of Freakonomics. Girls cringe when they hear the terms “cankles” and “fugly.” The Red Hot Chili Peppers even injected portamanteau into their music in Californication.
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