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Why is it that 99% of Wikipedia pages link to portmanteau?!?! I am so tired of reading a Wikipedia page only to see YET AGAIN this stupid word linked over and over and over! Every single possible time! It's like some kind of in-joke with Wikipedia authors. Or maybe there is a drinking game? Take a drink every time you manage to include the word portmanteau in your wiki page or you read someone else's wiki page which contains the word portmanteau. Or maybe we have some OCD linguist going around marking up every single portmanteau in Wikipedia. "Oh my god, someone might read this word and not realise what a brilliant portmanteau it really is!"
...... Oh well... cheers. Carry on. 24.222.66.229
Normally I don't chime in on 'nitpicky' type comments, but I will definitely have to agree with this point! I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed this. I swear there must be a "word a year" calendar somewhere that has "portmanteau" for 2006. There seem to be quite a few people who are extremely proud to know what this word means. Oh well, it's a very minor thing of course, but still a bit annoying. Technocratic 13:51, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
I checked this article just because I was wondering if there was some mention of this horrifying phenomenon. GRRRRRRRRR Korossyl 22:17, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
Ugh.. I really cannot stand to read the P-word one more time... 129.173.212.221 18:49, 25 May 2007 (UTC)
Thank you! This is such an annoying phenomenon. I absolutely remove links to this page if not directly related. Sbacle 11:57, 31 August 2007 (UTC)
Perhaps I'm beating a horse that just won't die, but portmanteau is certainly overused on Wikipedia. I think everybody is so annoyed by it that nobody wants to investigate why it is overused. It's just silly. Mvblair ( talk) 18:36, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
Nonsense, portmanteau is portmantastic. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to mix up some more Arakebite and black. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 145.18.22.9 ( talk) 14:00, 8 October 2008 (UTC)
Is there also a page that defines compound words, and is linked to by the million entries that meet that criteria? I PROPOSE THAT A TEAM BE FORMED TO PURGE WIKIPEDIA OF REFERENCES TO PORTMANTEAU. All you have to do is go to the "what links here" list and move through the list.-- Drvanthorp ( talk) 17:57, 29 January 2009 (UTC)
I have tried what has been suggested here; however, it seems there is a highly pro-portmanteau movement. Whenever I attempt to change a page, it is reverted within seconds. I even tried to change the order of the disambiguation page, but I was told that the Lewis Carroll 'definition' was at the top for a reason. Do they want to make Wikipedia look like it's gone through the looking glass? Drinkybird ( talk) 17:14, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
I have started conversations on several articles that link to the portmanteau word article.
Talk:Neuromancer#Portmanteau
Talk:Cholesterol#Portmanteau
Talk:Bollywood#Portmanteau
And there is the discussion that has started on the Project Linguistics page
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Linguistics#Portmanteaus
Drinkybird (
talk)
01:25, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
I absolutely agree, I am tired of seeing the word portmanteau linked on (almost) every Wikipedia page (it seems). Someone needs to make a bot that unlinks this word. Oh my goodness, imagine if every word on Wikipedia were linked to its definition! Okay, so that's extreme: but, imagine if every word that was not in every person's everyday usage were linked to its definition! Aiiieeeee! (No, really. Stop linking this word to the Wikipedia article, for the love of all that is holy.) -- Mecandes ( talk) 21:37, 3 December 2009 (UTC).
I tried changing portmanteau to compound word on a page where portmanteau was wrongly used. It was reverted in 19 minutes. A part of me think would be a good idea to mention the term fashion word in the article 83.179.25.167 ( talk) 17:12, 2 December 2011 (UTC)
While I support the removal of incorrect occurrences, I am going to disagree with practically everybody here. I think many of the occurrences of "portmanteau" should remain for the reason they were put there: The words are portmanteaus. Many words are portmanteaus. I don't see the problem of stating the truth, even if it's fairly obvious, like "breakfast" being a portmanteau of "break" and "fast." I would genuinely appreciate any argument against the use of "portmanteau" in Wikipedia article that is not "it is annoying"; many things are annoying, like getting up early or stubbing your toe, but that does not invalidate them. To those who say that the word should not be used, I should like to remind you that language is not static. Language is always changing, and words are accepted if the language's speakers accept them. Merriam-Webster recognizes the word, as well as many other online dictionaries. I see no problem with using language accurately. Darkgroup ( talk) 22:14, 16 March 2012 (UTC)
It's true that "portmanteau" is a correct description. It's also true that coin collectors can be correctly called "numismatists," blood pressure cuffs can be correctly called "sphygmomanometers," and house cats can correctly be called "felids." Puh-leeze. The use of "portmanteau" where "compound word," "blending," or other descriptions would do equally well is nothing more than an attempt to imply a high level of scholarship by using an uncommon word which sounds sophisticated -- and to some, sounds especially sophisticated simply because its origins are obviously French. There's nothing wrong with saying things simply and clearly -- and since I'm advocating that, I'll demonstrate the idea by restating my earlier point in that way. "Portmanteau" is pompous. It is pretentious. It is an unnecessary, highfalutin, "fifty-cent word." Its use in Wikipedia is clearly intended to imply high quality of content, but it conveys no meaning beyond what can be conveyed with simpler terms. And this intent is transparently obvious to any half-educated web surfer who stumbles into Wikipedia. "Portmanteau" must die. 98.65.230.72 ( talk) 19:43, 25 July 2012 (UTC)
Gentlemen. I believe that you are dealing with a Streisand effect here. The more you attempt to fight the ubiquity of portmanteau, ad portmementenauseum, the more it will xeroxerate ( Portmanteau). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.183.142.219 ( talk) 05:52, 20 November 2012 (UTC)
... Huh. I didn't even notice this discussion when I went and made several of these changes eliminating "portmanteau" a few days ago; they've stayed unreverted. Have the portmanteauists all faded away? 4pq1injbok ( talk) 20:43, 6 March 2013 (UTC)
Let me put my vote in being sick and tired of articles linking to "portmanteau". In most cases, the fact that they are compound words are obvious and it doesn't need to be explained as a portmanteau. The original word is probably in most cases less confusing than calling it a word that nobody knows. In most cases, "portmanteau" would be better off removed in favor of simpler words like "combination".-- ZXCVBNM ( TALK) 09:44, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
A number of inaccuracies need ameliorated. I began doing so, but it's getting late and I'm tired...!
1. A portmanteau doesn't fuse grammatical functions - it "fuses" morphemes.
2. In the context of linguistic definition, to refer to a "folk" usage of portmanteau is to appeal to the strictly linguistic conception of folk etymology as a "naive misunderstanding of a more or less esoteric word that makes it into something more familiar." (Algeo, The Origins and Development of the English Language.) This is not an appropriate qualification. A portmanteau may very well be a more popular (and is the older) term for the more jargonistic "blend", but it is not somehow a "naive misunderstanding" by virtue of its origin or popularity.
3. A portmanteau is used two ways: synonymously with blend, and to refer to "a factitious word" (OED) which is a blend in the Carrolian sense. For the first definition, this article need only link to the blend article; the rest of the article should describe, provide the etymology and give examples of portmanteau in its distinctive sense, eg by explaining why "Bennifer" is a portmanteau in this latter sense while "smog" isn't. (Bennifer is a neologism; smog was, but is now in common usage.)
[We have public-domain dictionaries available to us; can we please provide one of those definitions without an link to M-W?]
Removing:
The Merriam-Webster definition of portmanteau gives two meanings:
Whoever removed this made other parts of the article make no sense! yuliya 00:03, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
Leaving aside the fact that this is meant to be an article, and not just another interminable list, I'm removing some whith I don't think qualify as portmanteaus:
Sheriff is from 'Shire' and 'Reeve'
why do these simple lists of examples have to balloon into all this? What's the point? We'll end up having to prune most of them off into a "list of portmanteaus", and wikipedia is not a dictionary. -- Tarquin 08:19 Oct 3, 2002 (UTC)
it's shear balloonacy! see http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/popcult/handouts/blends78.html for this and other examples of 'Lexical blending'.
Shareware, Adware, spyware, nagware are not backformations. For example, shareware is not simply 'the morpheme 'Ad' plus the morpheme Ware' - it is the word advertisement plus the word software. Otherwise for example Adware would be any 'ware' which is used by people in the advertising industry - instead of specifically 'software' containing advertisements. for this reason they fit the classic portmanteau definition.
-- Leon
Would anyone object if I got rid of the massive list of examples and trimmed it down to about three? - Martin
Nope. Keep the best ones. Ditch the dull & contentious ones. Wikipedia is not a collection of lists ... -- Tarquin 22:18 Dec 13, 2002 (UTC)
I removed Internet, as the word is a portmanteu, but incorrectly stated. The proper words would be interconnected and network. The etymology is internetwork as per U.S. Department of Defense 1986. An internetwork refers to an interconnected system of networks, especially computer networks. Being international has no relevence to the term. -- sysg0d
I could have sworn the words in "Jabberwocky" were derived from Old English. If they are truly portmanteaus, they need an explanation of which words they combine because it certainly isn't obvious. Tokerboy 01:41 Oct 20, 2002 (UTC)
-- Leon
The external link was bad. Please test it and see if it should not be removed. Fred Bauder 15:28 Dec 13, 2002 (UTC)
Is there any link with the french word porte-manteaux which literally means Jacket-Holder ?
Are "portmanteau" and "compound word" synonymous? My inclination is no, that portmanteaux may drop intervening syllables or letters (as in "smog" and "brunch") while compound words never do (as in "rainbow" and "baseball").
-- zandperl 04:49, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Wikipedia is not a corporation. Ergo, its name can't be an example of "corporate brand name". Ditto for Wiktionary. So I suggest we remove one of (or both) these examples and add a real corporate brand name instead (can't think of a good example now). Paranoid 10:11, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Some of you may have noticed that there are now only five examples of frankenwords in the article. Don't freak out, portmanteau contributors. Your contributions have not vanished into oblivion. I have relocated them all at the List of portmanteaux page. Please also make any new contributions there.--------Kelisi 2005/2/5
What the hell is that? Can anyone who knows write at least a stub on it? Because currently, frankenword redirects here, but this article does not explain what a frankenword is. Lev 11:35, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)
[Just in case you're curious: http://www.macmillandictionary.com/med-magazine/October2004/23-New-Word-frankenword.htm]
Frankenword is not an perfect synonym of portmanteau. Frankenword connotes a word with an awkward or offputting sound or concept (e.g. infotainment, feminazi or stalkerazzi) unlike portmanteau which may be melifluous or clever. The difference is explained in this good article. [1] Could some some cunning linguist with a little time add a paragraph making this distinction? H Bruthzoo 00:56, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
You can't really say that slithy is not a portmanteau, since it is the first example of a portmanteau Carroll ever gave. It seems he preferred "creative" portmanteaus to "regular" ones such as smog. For example, in the preface to The Hunting of the Snark, he explains the concept using fruminous, formed from fuming and furious. - Lev 20:44, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Just as Alice did, I once thought this Carroll carol a lazy & pleasantly creative use of meaningless sounds, but now see it as an artful use of the vague cultural meaning of sounds in the context of syntactically structured but undefined words.-- Wikidity ( talk) 00:37, 4 October 2014 (UTC)
I don't dislike the idea of the article breakup, but methinks it went the wrong direction. The linguistics meaning seems to be the one that should get the predominant coverage under portmanteau, as it has a lot more content, and it has a lot more potential content. — Stevie is the man! Talk | Contrib 21:50, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Further, it appears that most articles referring to this term mean to link to the linguistics meaning, and this now means that a lot of cleanup is in store unless we transpose the breakup. — Stevie is the man! Talk | Contrib 22:00, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Any objections to removing all syllabic abbreviations from the List of portmanteaus? - Lev 20:30, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
This article doesn't define how linguists use the word, it merely says how they do not. I would like it if someone who knows could fill in how they do use it. Thanks. Luqui 07:59, 2005 May 2 (UTC)
The article doesn't state the original meaning of `portmanteau', i.e. a suitcase which opens into two compartments.
Is this a pormenteau word? It's pseudonym + anonymity. (Very possibly a Frankenword, really.) Do please let me know -- I've just done a major edit on Pseudonymity, and I'd like to feel confident identifying the term as P. Best regards. Bryan 02:42, 1 November 2005 (UTC)
The plural can be spelled either way. I googled both -x and -s along with the word linguistics just to make sure i didn't end up with anything irrelevant and the s got 720 and the x got 630 hits. And I saw a dictionary site that explicitly said either was fine. Dave 01:14, 11 December 2005 (UTC)
If Carrol invented the word then his meaning should come first with an explanation. Is it fair to call those words fitting his definition to be false portmanteaux?-- Gbleem 22:22, 11 December 2005 (UTC)
What about the Italian/musical word portamento, which means to glide from one note to the next (effectively joining the two)? In this case it seems more likely that the root is the Italian verb "portare" (to carry) than an English adaptation of a French word...I really think there's more going on here than this Lewis Carroll business. Here's hoping someone does some deeper research on it as I haven't find anything yet. **In any case, there should be a citation for the statement about Carroll coining the term. 24.151.54.61 07:16, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
Are there any synonyms for this word? -- Dara 04:22, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
Carroll used such words to humorous effect in his poems, especially Jabberwocky, which Humpty Dumpty is explaining to Alice.
This sentence really makes no sense at all. Neither Humpty Dumpty nor Alice appear in Jabberwocky and the clause on the end is incomplete at best. I'm not exactly sure what this is trying to say.
I dropped this from the article: "2005 was a bumper year for the overuse of media portmanteaux. Examples include: Brangelina (for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie); TomKat (Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes); and Scalito (Samuel Alito and Antonia Scalia)."
"2005 was a bumper year", says who? Or is this original research consisting of the subjective impressions of the writer? "overuse" is judgemental and doesn't belong regardless. Referring to usage in a specific year like this also violates the style recommendations (don't include stuff that'll get old fast). I don't feel this paragraph added anything to the article. -- BluePlatypus 18:31, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
Responding to an anon IP's change of the example of a portmanteau word from French aux to English infotainment, infotainment doesn't exemplify a portmanteau in the technical sense. In the field of linguistics, infotainment isn't a portmanteau. Rather, it is a blend. A portmanteau has to have function word status (it has to fulfill grammatical roleswords like the, and, etc.without adding meaningful content to the sentence. Contractions (in any language) are great examples of portmanteaus. The difference the anon IP tried to reference between "phonetic contractions" and "semantic contractions" can hardly be said to exist when the single phoneme /o/ can carry all the information that is there in aux.
There seems to be confusion between the French meaning of the word porte-manteau (sp?) ("coat-rack") and the English meaning ("large suitcase"). The Etymology section kind of fluctuates back and forth, ending with the strange "Portmanteau" is rarely used for its original meaning in current English, that type of travelling case having fallen into disuse." - whereas travelling cases hadn't been mentioned. It looks like Carroll *was* referring to a suitcase when he talked about meanings being "packed together". Whereas our folk etymology refers to coat racks: "In modern French, a "portemanteau" (from "manteau" (coat) and the verb "porter", to carry) is a coat rack: it gathers at a single location the different coats of different people, hence the linguistic idea of fusing different words into one."
Can someone attempt to straighten this one out? A link to portmanteau (suitcase) would probably help too... Stevage 17:47, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
Cheers Gregorydavid 06:24, 8 May 2006 (UTC) PS now we need to rename the articles correctly..
Don't you think that portmanteau is just another name for blending, consequently they both refer to the same linguistic phenomenon. I suggest that the single article be created for blending and portmanteau, with the reference to various names suggested by scholars (blending, portmanteau, telescoping ...)
If the first element of a portmateau is a proper noun but the portmateau itself isn't, do you capitalized it? The example where I get my concern is the word Japanoise, a music genre composing the words Japanese & noise. Nagelfar 16:51, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
I'm deleting the note about the "portmanteau" function on synths, because what it describes is called a portamento on a string instrument and really anywhere else in music, and I'm pretty sure that that author confused the two words. I don't know synths too well, though, so correct me if I'm wrong.
I perhaps am wrong, but I have always believed that for a word to be an actual portmanteau it is comprised of parts of both words from which it originated, but not contain the entire of either:
And, for this reason I would have believed that Wikipedia is infact not a portmanteau, based on its definition here which states:
“ | the word Wikipedia itself is a portmanteau of wiki and encyclopedia. | ” |
which means it contains the entire word "wiki", not just a part of it. Thoughts? - Glen Stollery 21:06, 11 June 2006 (UTC)
I thought the word " Brexit" was a portmanteau, and that is a combination of the initial letters of Britain and the whole word "exit". Ergo, this is another portmanteau which is made from a whole word. Vorbee ( talk) 09:27, 31 October 2017 (UTC)
Surely 'Pickfair' was the first example? Originally the name of the mansion of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Snr it was thereafter used in the press as shorthand for the couple.
Why are imaginary TV show couples listed under celebrity couples? Shouldn't they have their own subheading, since imaginary characters are not exactly celebrities? Also, as a Luka/Abby fan since the very beginning, I can most definitely state that that pairing was called Luby back then, at least in its first incarnation - just one B there.
VjeraNadaLjubav 17:07, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
I am wondering about the following paragraph from the article:
Lewis Carroll, cited in the entymology section, uses the word portmanteau to mean suitcase, the English portmanteau, not coat rack, French porte-manteau. The fact that suitcase, not coat-rack, is the correct etymology is vividly clear when one considers that Carroll uses the words "packed up," and "two" (the original portmeanteau was a two compartment, folding item). The linguistic portmanteau represented by the word webinar clearly has nothing to do with a coat rack, as a coat-rack has nothing to do with packing meanings together.
Am I the only one who feels that this paragraph requires either editing or removal? Clearly nobody knows exactly what Carroll had in mind when he wrote portmanteau and so one theory is just as relevant as another. I could argue easily, for example, that Carroll was referring to the French porte-manteau in that the word itself is composed of two distinct words -- that it is a word with two meanings "packed up" into one.
This is a POV issue and, in addition, also has a tone that is a bit too... hostile, in my opinion. Any objections to my editing/removing it? - Sarfa 20:15, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
isnt' gulag a syllabic abbreviation rather than a portmanteau as well? 194.80.31.68 16:27, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
Is it just me, or is portmanteau used a lot in wikipedia articles? I wonder what they would use on french wikipedia? JE at UWO U/ T 06:08, 11 November 2006 (UTC)
I agree with Je_at_uwo that "portmanteau" aficionados have run amok on Wikipedia. Calling COMSEC a portmanteau adds no value to that particular article, and instead detracts from its introductory statement. No more advocacy, please. neil.steiner ( talk) 22:09, 26 September 2011 (UTC).
Removed this text In religion, " Godisnowhere" has been used by a Denver, CO based Christian evangelism team since 1996. from the article. While it does have two different combinations, neither of those combinations are actual portmanteau.
The article states that the original phrase "portmanteau word" has "since been abbreviated to simply 'portmanteau' as the term (and the type of words it describes) gained popularity" (and, indeed, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau_word redirects to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau) This being the case, in the interest consistency, shouldn't the latter be used to refer to the concept in question across wikipedia? Frankly, this site is the only place I've personally ever seen the extended phrase used, and while I'll readily admit that such anecdotal evidence is ridiculously weak, the article in question agrees; so why use the awkward-sounding, anachronistic version rather than the more concise, generally-accepted one? 134.29.33.119 22:41, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
I couldn't agree more. I am a Linguistics professor and I myself have never personally heard the term "portmanteau word" before! This seemed a little strange to me and I took the liberty of editing the "Meaning" section rather heavily. I feel it is much, much improved. Logologist, the fact that the word itself has a literal meaning in French is entirely irrelevant. There should be parenthesis around the "word" part, it should not be modified incorrectly to have it's own page.
76.93.90.245 (
talk)
04:09, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
I am very disturbed that a 'Linguistics professor' writes it's for its (above). This somewhat lessens his or her academic authority :-} Smerus ( talk) 04:55, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
A few days back, FuriousBall added the portmanteau "skexy" in the opening paragraph. Until it becomes a real word, I don't think it belongs here. -- A. 01:16, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
Why is there no mention of The Chunnel? -- A. 05:09, 05 September 2007 (UTC)
This word is in an insane number of Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia LOVES this word. It wants to have babies with it! Literally.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.224.59.152 ( talk) 00:37, 7 May 2007
While it started slow, there are now hundreds of examples of the use of "Vietraq" to be found using a Google search. It is pretty widespread online and is a valid example of a portmanteau. Michaelh2001 18:52, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
I've removed quark and operad. While one theory of the origin of quark is a portmanteu it is by no means conclusive. Operad as stated on its page was thought up out of nothing. Graemec2 12:31, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
How about:
Any progress on sorting out the situation with this page and blend? At the moment, they are largely covering the same ground; with this page occasionally switching to referring to portmanteau in the more technical linguistic sense - a blend strictly of two function words.
My perception is that the commonly-used meaning of portmanteau is the one shared between this article and blend; with the other meaning a niche linguistics term. This page at least mentions that there are two different meanings, though the intro is far from clear on what the difference is (isn't "a word or morpheme that fuses two or more words or word parts to give a combined or loaded meaning" more or less the same thing as "a word formed by combining both sounds and meanings from two or more words"?), and the distinction that portmanteau is sometimes only used to refer to blends of function words isn't introduced until later. Blend, on the other hand, gives the impression that only blend is acceptable to refer to non-function-word blends, with portmanteau being purely for function words. At least in common usage, I don't think this is true.
At the moment I think people are being thoroughly confused - Oxbridge has just had a mention switched from portmanteau to blend, on the basis that the blend page says that it is not strictly a portmanteau (as it is not composed of function words); whereas I think that, in the common usage, Oxbridge is a clear portmanteau - the function-word-only definition seems to be a rarely-used one.
Any suggestions for sorting this out? It looks like we have two separate terms; one should probably be at portmanteau (which I think is the common usage) with a redirect at blend, and the other at portmanteau (linguistics). The current situation is confusing me, at least. TSP 16:52, 20 September 2007 (UTC)
Shouldn't Bootylicious be mentioned in the popular culture section? Or is this not a valid application of a portmanteau? -- MaTrIx ( talk) 08:12, 28 November 2007 (UTC)
Is this picture appropriate for the heading of portmanteau? It seems more like an advertisement for an artist's work, while its relevance to or classification as portmanteau is itself debatable. Lapunkd ( talk) 22:29, 8 January 2008 (UTC)
i agree. it is a portmanteau, but a very poor one. a good portmanteau would link two immanently meaningful words. Factotum ( talk) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.72.149.137 ( talk) 11:24, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
This page is completely wrong and needs to be removed as OR. The Lewis Carroll quote says it is "like" a portmanteau, which is a bag. There are no such things as portmanteau words. The word is, in 99% of the uses, always used for a bag, and only used by websites who are misreading Lewis Carroll as anything but the bag. No legitimate recognized dictionary accepts it as anything but a bag. Lewis Carroll didn't accept it as anything but a bag. Ottava Rima ( talk) 04:19, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
Even ignoring how Carroll used it, the OED cites other examples in precisely the sense you object to back to 1882. Have you read the OED entry? Stephen Turner ( Talk) 17:47, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
For the record, Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged [3] cites "portmanteau word" as being identical in meaning to "blend." The Collegiate dictionary, same site [4] gives a definition of "portmanteau" as "a word or morpheme whose form and meaning are derived from a blending of two or more distinct forms." (Please note that these are subscription services and so may not be generally available for free viewing.) -- Dajagr ( talk) 20:36, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
So wait, are we deleting the article or not? Because I could nominate it for deletion right now if you want. Is that what we've agreed on? Calgary ( talk) 08:37, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
Who exactly is the we here? This discussion seems to have died the death under its own inanition, with no comments for nearl;y 4 months. That seems to indicate there is no urge to delete save from 8va Rima. Smerus ( talk) 09:28, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
The article states It is a common misconception that the word portemanteau was used as slang by Lewis Carroll to describe his use of combing two or more words or word parts to give a combined or loaded new meaning. This is based off of a misreading of a passage in 'Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There'when Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice words from the Jabberwocky, saying, “Well, slithy means lithe and slimy ... You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.” Instead of reading the sentence as an analogy, many have seen it as a statement. The dropping of the word "like" has lead to this misreading.
Undoubtedly, some people have the history of this word wrong. But what is the evidence that this is a "common" misconception? The idea of a "portmanteau word" is often traced to that passage about Humpty-Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass -- I've seen this in a number of books about words. But does the article really need a long paragraph to debunk a "misconception" whose existence has not been established? Daqu ( talk) 05:16, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
I may be foolishly wading into a controversy here. In fact, I almost certainly am. But I've attempted to rewrite the page to recognise both senses of "portmanteau", the specialist linguistic one and the popular one. As I commented in the section This Page is Wrong just above, the OED recognises both senses and provides citations for them. The popular sense is older and includes the original use of portmanteau (as a type of word) and the original use of brunch.
It seems clear to me that the page has lost NPOV recently, condemning the popular sense of portmanteau as a "misconception" and a "misreading" despite its long history and its use in reliable sources. I've tried to be more balanced, explaining both the meanings while being clear that linguists use the words "portmanteau" and "blend" in more specific and distinct senses. I hope I've succeeded in this.
Stephen Turner ( Talk) 12:03, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
There seems to be some confusion here. The wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a dictionary. One of the main differences between an encyclopedia and a dictionary is that an encyclopedia has an entry/article on a particular topic, whereas a dictionary has an entry on a particular word.
In this article, this means that information on the use of portmanteau where it refers to the rights and wrongs of it being about putting multiple words together, must go into a different article than use of the portmanteau to refer to a bag.- ( User) WolfKeeper ( Talk) 17:53, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
See: Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_not_a_dictionary#The_differences_between_encyclopedia_and_dictionary_articles for more details.- ( User) WolfKeeper ( Talk) 17:57, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
The article Portmanteau (suitcase) seems to have been lost somewhere in a series of re-directs. TheRedPenOfDoom ( talk) 18:31, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
I am not sure why you keep trying to insist that a word cannot have two (or more) meanings, even if there was originally one source for the word. Take Spam for a recent example. Originally spam/portmanteau had one meaning. Now it has more. When people use spam/portmanteau, 90% of the time they are clearly referring to one meaning or another- not both. TheRedPenOfDoom ( talk) 21:24, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
Okay, I've reviewed this article's history and talk pages carefully. It began with my intention to create a list of portmanteau words, before realizing there was a redirect, which meant I had to delve into the history and talk pages to see what the contents of that page had been and why it was no more. In the process, I found Category:Portmanteaus, which is fine, but I also noticed that edit warring seems to have prevented this article from addressing:
I agree that characterizing the use of "portmanteau word" as based on a misconception is silly. I agree with the separation of the suitcase article and the word article. I do not support merging this article into Blend, because "portmanteau" obviously has a significant literary context and its place in popular culture will detract from the strictly linguistic-based article on blends. Elle ( talk) 02:37, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
I removed the following from the article
Portmanteaus are frequently used for proper names as well as common nouns, sometimes producing epithets such as "Scalito" (referring to Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia). Here, the purpose for blending is not so much to combine the meanings of the source words but "to suggest a resemblance of one named person to the other" and the effect is often derogatory [1].
Source appears to be a blog and not a reliable source. TheRedPenOfDoom ( talk) 20:02, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
This edit [ [5]] and this edit [ [6]] removed some examples from other languages. While this IS the English WP article, I believe that including at least a few global examples is beneficial to the article. I am particularly intrigued by the place name examples that appear to be as strong and unique tradition as "BLANK-gate"s are becoming in English. (although limiting the number of place names a bit might be in order.)
Does anyone else have any comments? TheRedPenOfDoom ( talk) 17:35, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
The thing is, the (inevitably) random addition of examples from other languages (or indeed additional citations in English) risks making the article a prime example of rambling WP:OR. One way round this would be for someone to start an article List of portmanteau words (the title for which is currently a mere redirect),which could perhaps have sub-headings for different languages, and then folk could add examples (preferably each accompanied by a brief explanation) to their heart's content. And there is nothing preventing an article List of portmanteau place-names if anyone can be bothered. The lists could be cross-referenced within the main article, which would retain its 'encyclopaedic' role of explaining the term.-- Smerus ( talk) 20:39, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
Is there a special term to describe portmanteaux formed from synonymous words, e.g. guesstimate, chillax, confuzzled. Their recent appearance in colloquial English seems to be of note, even if their linguistic value is minimal. Aspirex ( talk) 07:50, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
←I gave Websters above. EB, at "Back-formations and blends", gives:
Blends fall into two groups: (1) coalescences, such as “bash” from “bang” and “smash”; and (2) telescoped forms, called portmanteau words, such as “motorcade” from “motor cavalcade.” In the first group are the words clash, from clack and crash, and geep, offspring of goat and sheep. To the second group belong dormobiles, or dormitory automobiles, and slurbs, or slum suburbs. A travel monologue becomes a travelogue and a telegram sent by cable a cablegram. Aviation electronics becomes avionics; biology electronics, bionics; and nuclear electronics, nucleonics. In cablese a question mark is a quark; in computerese a binary unit is a bit. In astrophysics a quasistellar source of radio energy becomes a quasar, and a pulsating star becomes a pulsar.
- Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 02:56, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
There are two definitions in common use: the broad one (synonymous with blend), coined by Lewis Carroll, and the narrow linguistic one (as in “a le” → au).
This is a contentious debate ( WP:CONTROVERSY), as noted by above discussion and history of edits, all the more so because of the extensive list of articles that link to it – I suggest that as per WP:NPOV, we list both senses, prominently, in the lede.
I’ve done so (in this edit), with extensive citations – does this look like an acceptable form?
There is no call to merge, which would confuse. The article as it stands has a reference to the linguistic definition. ('Portmanteau' btw without an 'e' after the first 't').This seems sufficient. Smerus ( talk) 11:27, 26 June 2008 (UTC)
1. corrected typo in Carroll quote. "fumious" to "frumious", which is correct.
2. I believe the appending of "-gate" to scandals dates to whitewater, not watergate. Some clever editor first appended -gate to whitewater, making it whitewatergate. It is only since then that we are plague by this suffix. Can someone check this and make the relevant change in the page? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.215.187.165 ( talk) 06:20, 7 February 2009 (UTC)
Surely there's a limit to these words as actual words or made up stuff. Cellphone is generally accepted but I assume stuff like telethon can't possibly be considered an actual word, right? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Megapeen ( talk • contribs) 04:22, 30 April 2009 (UTC)
The word 'portmanteau' is itself a 'portmanteau word'
Is it? Seems like a compound to me. 72.75.81.72 ( talk) 03:10, 6 July 2009 (UTC)
I'm surprised that neither the article or its talk mentions "Bakerloo", as in London's Bakerloo line. Few people realise that this is a portmanteau word; it is derived from "Baker Street and Waterloo Railway", which opened in March 1906. It's not just a case of the portmanteau being much more well-known than the original name; but in July 1906, the portmanteau was adopted officially by that railway - they dropped the original name completely in 1910. So, I want to add a note; but judging by all the discussion above, it'll get trampled on. Where is the best place for it? -- Redrose64 ( talk) 15:44, 11 August 2009 (UTC)
what is it called when you have a word inside a word for example fan-f******-tastic? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Benjabby ( talk • contribs) 19:34, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
"An example being the well-known portmanteau word "Spanglish", referring to speaking a mix of both Spanish and English at the same time. In this case, there is no logical situation in which the speaker would say "Spanish English" in place of the portmanteau word in the same way they could say "do not" in place of the contraction "don't", or "we are" in place of "we're"."
The example is simply outright wrong. If "Spanglish" is not used, "Spanish English" is a perfectly good alternative. Spanish is an adjective as well as a noun. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.234.8.160 ( talk) 17:34, 21 October 2009 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 |
Why is it that 99% of Wikipedia pages link to portmanteau?!?! I am so tired of reading a Wikipedia page only to see YET AGAIN this stupid word linked over and over and over! Every single possible time! It's like some kind of in-joke with Wikipedia authors. Or maybe there is a drinking game? Take a drink every time you manage to include the word portmanteau in your wiki page or you read someone else's wiki page which contains the word portmanteau. Or maybe we have some OCD linguist going around marking up every single portmanteau in Wikipedia. "Oh my god, someone might read this word and not realise what a brilliant portmanteau it really is!"
...... Oh well... cheers. Carry on. 24.222.66.229
Normally I don't chime in on 'nitpicky' type comments, but I will definitely have to agree with this point! I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed this. I swear there must be a "word a year" calendar somewhere that has "portmanteau" for 2006. There seem to be quite a few people who are extremely proud to know what this word means. Oh well, it's a very minor thing of course, but still a bit annoying. Technocratic 13:51, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
I checked this article just because I was wondering if there was some mention of this horrifying phenomenon. GRRRRRRRRR Korossyl 22:17, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
Ugh.. I really cannot stand to read the P-word one more time... 129.173.212.221 18:49, 25 May 2007 (UTC)
Thank you! This is such an annoying phenomenon. I absolutely remove links to this page if not directly related. Sbacle 11:57, 31 August 2007 (UTC)
Perhaps I'm beating a horse that just won't die, but portmanteau is certainly overused on Wikipedia. I think everybody is so annoyed by it that nobody wants to investigate why it is overused. It's just silly. Mvblair ( talk) 18:36, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
Nonsense, portmanteau is portmantastic. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to mix up some more Arakebite and black. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 145.18.22.9 ( talk) 14:00, 8 October 2008 (UTC)
Is there also a page that defines compound words, and is linked to by the million entries that meet that criteria? I PROPOSE THAT A TEAM BE FORMED TO PURGE WIKIPEDIA OF REFERENCES TO PORTMANTEAU. All you have to do is go to the "what links here" list and move through the list.-- Drvanthorp ( talk) 17:57, 29 January 2009 (UTC)
I have tried what has been suggested here; however, it seems there is a highly pro-portmanteau movement. Whenever I attempt to change a page, it is reverted within seconds. I even tried to change the order of the disambiguation page, but I was told that the Lewis Carroll 'definition' was at the top for a reason. Do they want to make Wikipedia look like it's gone through the looking glass? Drinkybird ( talk) 17:14, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
I have started conversations on several articles that link to the portmanteau word article.
Talk:Neuromancer#Portmanteau
Talk:Cholesterol#Portmanteau
Talk:Bollywood#Portmanteau
And there is the discussion that has started on the Project Linguistics page
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Linguistics#Portmanteaus
Drinkybird (
talk)
01:25, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
I absolutely agree, I am tired of seeing the word portmanteau linked on (almost) every Wikipedia page (it seems). Someone needs to make a bot that unlinks this word. Oh my goodness, imagine if every word on Wikipedia were linked to its definition! Okay, so that's extreme: but, imagine if every word that was not in every person's everyday usage were linked to its definition! Aiiieeeee! (No, really. Stop linking this word to the Wikipedia article, for the love of all that is holy.) -- Mecandes ( talk) 21:37, 3 December 2009 (UTC).
I tried changing portmanteau to compound word on a page where portmanteau was wrongly used. It was reverted in 19 minutes. A part of me think would be a good idea to mention the term fashion word in the article 83.179.25.167 ( talk) 17:12, 2 December 2011 (UTC)
While I support the removal of incorrect occurrences, I am going to disagree with practically everybody here. I think many of the occurrences of "portmanteau" should remain for the reason they were put there: The words are portmanteaus. Many words are portmanteaus. I don't see the problem of stating the truth, even if it's fairly obvious, like "breakfast" being a portmanteau of "break" and "fast." I would genuinely appreciate any argument against the use of "portmanteau" in Wikipedia article that is not "it is annoying"; many things are annoying, like getting up early or stubbing your toe, but that does not invalidate them. To those who say that the word should not be used, I should like to remind you that language is not static. Language is always changing, and words are accepted if the language's speakers accept them. Merriam-Webster recognizes the word, as well as many other online dictionaries. I see no problem with using language accurately. Darkgroup ( talk) 22:14, 16 March 2012 (UTC)
It's true that "portmanteau" is a correct description. It's also true that coin collectors can be correctly called "numismatists," blood pressure cuffs can be correctly called "sphygmomanometers," and house cats can correctly be called "felids." Puh-leeze. The use of "portmanteau" where "compound word," "blending," or other descriptions would do equally well is nothing more than an attempt to imply a high level of scholarship by using an uncommon word which sounds sophisticated -- and to some, sounds especially sophisticated simply because its origins are obviously French. There's nothing wrong with saying things simply and clearly -- and since I'm advocating that, I'll demonstrate the idea by restating my earlier point in that way. "Portmanteau" is pompous. It is pretentious. It is an unnecessary, highfalutin, "fifty-cent word." Its use in Wikipedia is clearly intended to imply high quality of content, but it conveys no meaning beyond what can be conveyed with simpler terms. And this intent is transparently obvious to any half-educated web surfer who stumbles into Wikipedia. "Portmanteau" must die. 98.65.230.72 ( talk) 19:43, 25 July 2012 (UTC)
Gentlemen. I believe that you are dealing with a Streisand effect here. The more you attempt to fight the ubiquity of portmanteau, ad portmementenauseum, the more it will xeroxerate ( Portmanteau). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.183.142.219 ( talk) 05:52, 20 November 2012 (UTC)
... Huh. I didn't even notice this discussion when I went and made several of these changes eliminating "portmanteau" a few days ago; they've stayed unreverted. Have the portmanteauists all faded away? 4pq1injbok ( talk) 20:43, 6 March 2013 (UTC)
Let me put my vote in being sick and tired of articles linking to "portmanteau". In most cases, the fact that they are compound words are obvious and it doesn't need to be explained as a portmanteau. The original word is probably in most cases less confusing than calling it a word that nobody knows. In most cases, "portmanteau" would be better off removed in favor of simpler words like "combination".-- ZXCVBNM ( TALK) 09:44, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
A number of inaccuracies need ameliorated. I began doing so, but it's getting late and I'm tired...!
1. A portmanteau doesn't fuse grammatical functions - it "fuses" morphemes.
2. In the context of linguistic definition, to refer to a "folk" usage of portmanteau is to appeal to the strictly linguistic conception of folk etymology as a "naive misunderstanding of a more or less esoteric word that makes it into something more familiar." (Algeo, The Origins and Development of the English Language.) This is not an appropriate qualification. A portmanteau may very well be a more popular (and is the older) term for the more jargonistic "blend", but it is not somehow a "naive misunderstanding" by virtue of its origin or popularity.
3. A portmanteau is used two ways: synonymously with blend, and to refer to "a factitious word" (OED) which is a blend in the Carrolian sense. For the first definition, this article need only link to the blend article; the rest of the article should describe, provide the etymology and give examples of portmanteau in its distinctive sense, eg by explaining why "Bennifer" is a portmanteau in this latter sense while "smog" isn't. (Bennifer is a neologism; smog was, but is now in common usage.)
[We have public-domain dictionaries available to us; can we please provide one of those definitions without an link to M-W?]
Removing:
The Merriam-Webster definition of portmanteau gives two meanings:
Whoever removed this made other parts of the article make no sense! yuliya 00:03, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
Leaving aside the fact that this is meant to be an article, and not just another interminable list, I'm removing some whith I don't think qualify as portmanteaus:
Sheriff is from 'Shire' and 'Reeve'
why do these simple lists of examples have to balloon into all this? What's the point? We'll end up having to prune most of them off into a "list of portmanteaus", and wikipedia is not a dictionary. -- Tarquin 08:19 Oct 3, 2002 (UTC)
it's shear balloonacy! see http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/popcult/handouts/blends78.html for this and other examples of 'Lexical blending'.
Shareware, Adware, spyware, nagware are not backformations. For example, shareware is not simply 'the morpheme 'Ad' plus the morpheme Ware' - it is the word advertisement plus the word software. Otherwise for example Adware would be any 'ware' which is used by people in the advertising industry - instead of specifically 'software' containing advertisements. for this reason they fit the classic portmanteau definition.
-- Leon
Would anyone object if I got rid of the massive list of examples and trimmed it down to about three? - Martin
Nope. Keep the best ones. Ditch the dull & contentious ones. Wikipedia is not a collection of lists ... -- Tarquin 22:18 Dec 13, 2002 (UTC)
I removed Internet, as the word is a portmanteu, but incorrectly stated. The proper words would be interconnected and network. The etymology is internetwork as per U.S. Department of Defense 1986. An internetwork refers to an interconnected system of networks, especially computer networks. Being international has no relevence to the term. -- sysg0d
I could have sworn the words in "Jabberwocky" were derived from Old English. If they are truly portmanteaus, they need an explanation of which words they combine because it certainly isn't obvious. Tokerboy 01:41 Oct 20, 2002 (UTC)
-- Leon
The external link was bad. Please test it and see if it should not be removed. Fred Bauder 15:28 Dec 13, 2002 (UTC)
Is there any link with the french word porte-manteaux which literally means Jacket-Holder ?
Are "portmanteau" and "compound word" synonymous? My inclination is no, that portmanteaux may drop intervening syllables or letters (as in "smog" and "brunch") while compound words never do (as in "rainbow" and "baseball").
-- zandperl 04:49, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Wikipedia is not a corporation. Ergo, its name can't be an example of "corporate brand name". Ditto for Wiktionary. So I suggest we remove one of (or both) these examples and add a real corporate brand name instead (can't think of a good example now). Paranoid 10:11, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Some of you may have noticed that there are now only five examples of frankenwords in the article. Don't freak out, portmanteau contributors. Your contributions have not vanished into oblivion. I have relocated them all at the List of portmanteaux page. Please also make any new contributions there.--------Kelisi 2005/2/5
What the hell is that? Can anyone who knows write at least a stub on it? Because currently, frankenword redirects here, but this article does not explain what a frankenword is. Lev 11:35, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)
[Just in case you're curious: http://www.macmillandictionary.com/med-magazine/October2004/23-New-Word-frankenword.htm]
Frankenword is not an perfect synonym of portmanteau. Frankenword connotes a word with an awkward or offputting sound or concept (e.g. infotainment, feminazi or stalkerazzi) unlike portmanteau which may be melifluous or clever. The difference is explained in this good article. [1] Could some some cunning linguist with a little time add a paragraph making this distinction? H Bruthzoo 00:56, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
You can't really say that slithy is not a portmanteau, since it is the first example of a portmanteau Carroll ever gave. It seems he preferred "creative" portmanteaus to "regular" ones such as smog. For example, in the preface to The Hunting of the Snark, he explains the concept using fruminous, formed from fuming and furious. - Lev 20:44, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Just as Alice did, I once thought this Carroll carol a lazy & pleasantly creative use of meaningless sounds, but now see it as an artful use of the vague cultural meaning of sounds in the context of syntactically structured but undefined words.-- Wikidity ( talk) 00:37, 4 October 2014 (UTC)
I don't dislike the idea of the article breakup, but methinks it went the wrong direction. The linguistics meaning seems to be the one that should get the predominant coverage under portmanteau, as it has a lot more content, and it has a lot more potential content. — Stevie is the man! Talk | Contrib 21:50, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Further, it appears that most articles referring to this term mean to link to the linguistics meaning, and this now means that a lot of cleanup is in store unless we transpose the breakup. — Stevie is the man! Talk | Contrib 22:00, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Any objections to removing all syllabic abbreviations from the List of portmanteaus? - Lev 20:30, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
This article doesn't define how linguists use the word, it merely says how they do not. I would like it if someone who knows could fill in how they do use it. Thanks. Luqui 07:59, 2005 May 2 (UTC)
The article doesn't state the original meaning of `portmanteau', i.e. a suitcase which opens into two compartments.
Is this a pormenteau word? It's pseudonym + anonymity. (Very possibly a Frankenword, really.) Do please let me know -- I've just done a major edit on Pseudonymity, and I'd like to feel confident identifying the term as P. Best regards. Bryan 02:42, 1 November 2005 (UTC)
The plural can be spelled either way. I googled both -x and -s along with the word linguistics just to make sure i didn't end up with anything irrelevant and the s got 720 and the x got 630 hits. And I saw a dictionary site that explicitly said either was fine. Dave 01:14, 11 December 2005 (UTC)
If Carrol invented the word then his meaning should come first with an explanation. Is it fair to call those words fitting his definition to be false portmanteaux?-- Gbleem 22:22, 11 December 2005 (UTC)
What about the Italian/musical word portamento, which means to glide from one note to the next (effectively joining the two)? In this case it seems more likely that the root is the Italian verb "portare" (to carry) than an English adaptation of a French word...I really think there's more going on here than this Lewis Carroll business. Here's hoping someone does some deeper research on it as I haven't find anything yet. **In any case, there should be a citation for the statement about Carroll coining the term. 24.151.54.61 07:16, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
Are there any synonyms for this word? -- Dara 04:22, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
Carroll used such words to humorous effect in his poems, especially Jabberwocky, which Humpty Dumpty is explaining to Alice.
This sentence really makes no sense at all. Neither Humpty Dumpty nor Alice appear in Jabberwocky and the clause on the end is incomplete at best. I'm not exactly sure what this is trying to say.
I dropped this from the article: "2005 was a bumper year for the overuse of media portmanteaux. Examples include: Brangelina (for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie); TomKat (Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes); and Scalito (Samuel Alito and Antonia Scalia)."
"2005 was a bumper year", says who? Or is this original research consisting of the subjective impressions of the writer? "overuse" is judgemental and doesn't belong regardless. Referring to usage in a specific year like this also violates the style recommendations (don't include stuff that'll get old fast). I don't feel this paragraph added anything to the article. -- BluePlatypus 18:31, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
Responding to an anon IP's change of the example of a portmanteau word from French aux to English infotainment, infotainment doesn't exemplify a portmanteau in the technical sense. In the field of linguistics, infotainment isn't a portmanteau. Rather, it is a blend. A portmanteau has to have function word status (it has to fulfill grammatical roleswords like the, and, etc.without adding meaningful content to the sentence. Contractions (in any language) are great examples of portmanteaus. The difference the anon IP tried to reference between "phonetic contractions" and "semantic contractions" can hardly be said to exist when the single phoneme /o/ can carry all the information that is there in aux.
There seems to be confusion between the French meaning of the word porte-manteau (sp?) ("coat-rack") and the English meaning ("large suitcase"). The Etymology section kind of fluctuates back and forth, ending with the strange "Portmanteau" is rarely used for its original meaning in current English, that type of travelling case having fallen into disuse." - whereas travelling cases hadn't been mentioned. It looks like Carroll *was* referring to a suitcase when he talked about meanings being "packed together". Whereas our folk etymology refers to coat racks: "In modern French, a "portemanteau" (from "manteau" (coat) and the verb "porter", to carry) is a coat rack: it gathers at a single location the different coats of different people, hence the linguistic idea of fusing different words into one."
Can someone attempt to straighten this one out? A link to portmanteau (suitcase) would probably help too... Stevage 17:47, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
Cheers Gregorydavid 06:24, 8 May 2006 (UTC) PS now we need to rename the articles correctly..
Don't you think that portmanteau is just another name for blending, consequently they both refer to the same linguistic phenomenon. I suggest that the single article be created for blending and portmanteau, with the reference to various names suggested by scholars (blending, portmanteau, telescoping ...)
If the first element of a portmateau is a proper noun but the portmateau itself isn't, do you capitalized it? The example where I get my concern is the word Japanoise, a music genre composing the words Japanese & noise. Nagelfar 16:51, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
I'm deleting the note about the "portmanteau" function on synths, because what it describes is called a portamento on a string instrument and really anywhere else in music, and I'm pretty sure that that author confused the two words. I don't know synths too well, though, so correct me if I'm wrong.
I perhaps am wrong, but I have always believed that for a word to be an actual portmanteau it is comprised of parts of both words from which it originated, but not contain the entire of either:
And, for this reason I would have believed that Wikipedia is infact not a portmanteau, based on its definition here which states:
“ | the word Wikipedia itself is a portmanteau of wiki and encyclopedia. | ” |
which means it contains the entire word "wiki", not just a part of it. Thoughts? - Glen Stollery 21:06, 11 June 2006 (UTC)
I thought the word " Brexit" was a portmanteau, and that is a combination of the initial letters of Britain and the whole word "exit". Ergo, this is another portmanteau which is made from a whole word. Vorbee ( talk) 09:27, 31 October 2017 (UTC)
Surely 'Pickfair' was the first example? Originally the name of the mansion of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Snr it was thereafter used in the press as shorthand for the couple.
Why are imaginary TV show couples listed under celebrity couples? Shouldn't they have their own subheading, since imaginary characters are not exactly celebrities? Also, as a Luka/Abby fan since the very beginning, I can most definitely state that that pairing was called Luby back then, at least in its first incarnation - just one B there.
VjeraNadaLjubav 17:07, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
I am wondering about the following paragraph from the article:
Lewis Carroll, cited in the entymology section, uses the word portmanteau to mean suitcase, the English portmanteau, not coat rack, French porte-manteau. The fact that suitcase, not coat-rack, is the correct etymology is vividly clear when one considers that Carroll uses the words "packed up," and "two" (the original portmeanteau was a two compartment, folding item). The linguistic portmanteau represented by the word webinar clearly has nothing to do with a coat rack, as a coat-rack has nothing to do with packing meanings together.
Am I the only one who feels that this paragraph requires either editing or removal? Clearly nobody knows exactly what Carroll had in mind when he wrote portmanteau and so one theory is just as relevant as another. I could argue easily, for example, that Carroll was referring to the French porte-manteau in that the word itself is composed of two distinct words -- that it is a word with two meanings "packed up" into one.
This is a POV issue and, in addition, also has a tone that is a bit too... hostile, in my opinion. Any objections to my editing/removing it? - Sarfa 20:15, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
isnt' gulag a syllabic abbreviation rather than a portmanteau as well? 194.80.31.68 16:27, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
Is it just me, or is portmanteau used a lot in wikipedia articles? I wonder what they would use on french wikipedia? JE at UWO U/ T 06:08, 11 November 2006 (UTC)
I agree with Je_at_uwo that "portmanteau" aficionados have run amok on Wikipedia. Calling COMSEC a portmanteau adds no value to that particular article, and instead detracts from its introductory statement. No more advocacy, please. neil.steiner ( talk) 22:09, 26 September 2011 (UTC).
Removed this text In religion, " Godisnowhere" has been used by a Denver, CO based Christian evangelism team since 1996. from the article. While it does have two different combinations, neither of those combinations are actual portmanteau.
The article states that the original phrase "portmanteau word" has "since been abbreviated to simply 'portmanteau' as the term (and the type of words it describes) gained popularity" (and, indeed, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau_word redirects to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau) This being the case, in the interest consistency, shouldn't the latter be used to refer to the concept in question across wikipedia? Frankly, this site is the only place I've personally ever seen the extended phrase used, and while I'll readily admit that such anecdotal evidence is ridiculously weak, the article in question agrees; so why use the awkward-sounding, anachronistic version rather than the more concise, generally-accepted one? 134.29.33.119 22:41, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
I couldn't agree more. I am a Linguistics professor and I myself have never personally heard the term "portmanteau word" before! This seemed a little strange to me and I took the liberty of editing the "Meaning" section rather heavily. I feel it is much, much improved. Logologist, the fact that the word itself has a literal meaning in French is entirely irrelevant. There should be parenthesis around the "word" part, it should not be modified incorrectly to have it's own page.
76.93.90.245 (
talk)
04:09, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
I am very disturbed that a 'Linguistics professor' writes it's for its (above). This somewhat lessens his or her academic authority :-} Smerus ( talk) 04:55, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
A few days back, FuriousBall added the portmanteau "skexy" in the opening paragraph. Until it becomes a real word, I don't think it belongs here. -- A. 01:16, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
Why is there no mention of The Chunnel? -- A. 05:09, 05 September 2007 (UTC)
This word is in an insane number of Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia LOVES this word. It wants to have babies with it! Literally.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.224.59.152 ( talk) 00:37, 7 May 2007
While it started slow, there are now hundreds of examples of the use of "Vietraq" to be found using a Google search. It is pretty widespread online and is a valid example of a portmanteau. Michaelh2001 18:52, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
I've removed quark and operad. While one theory of the origin of quark is a portmanteu it is by no means conclusive. Operad as stated on its page was thought up out of nothing. Graemec2 12:31, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
How about:
Any progress on sorting out the situation with this page and blend? At the moment, they are largely covering the same ground; with this page occasionally switching to referring to portmanteau in the more technical linguistic sense - a blend strictly of two function words.
My perception is that the commonly-used meaning of portmanteau is the one shared between this article and blend; with the other meaning a niche linguistics term. This page at least mentions that there are two different meanings, though the intro is far from clear on what the difference is (isn't "a word or morpheme that fuses two or more words or word parts to give a combined or loaded meaning" more or less the same thing as "a word formed by combining both sounds and meanings from two or more words"?), and the distinction that portmanteau is sometimes only used to refer to blends of function words isn't introduced until later. Blend, on the other hand, gives the impression that only blend is acceptable to refer to non-function-word blends, with portmanteau being purely for function words. At least in common usage, I don't think this is true.
At the moment I think people are being thoroughly confused - Oxbridge has just had a mention switched from portmanteau to blend, on the basis that the blend page says that it is not strictly a portmanteau (as it is not composed of function words); whereas I think that, in the common usage, Oxbridge is a clear portmanteau - the function-word-only definition seems to be a rarely-used one.
Any suggestions for sorting this out? It looks like we have two separate terms; one should probably be at portmanteau (which I think is the common usage) with a redirect at blend, and the other at portmanteau (linguistics). The current situation is confusing me, at least. TSP 16:52, 20 September 2007 (UTC)
Shouldn't Bootylicious be mentioned in the popular culture section? Or is this not a valid application of a portmanteau? -- MaTrIx ( talk) 08:12, 28 November 2007 (UTC)
Is this picture appropriate for the heading of portmanteau? It seems more like an advertisement for an artist's work, while its relevance to or classification as portmanteau is itself debatable. Lapunkd ( talk) 22:29, 8 January 2008 (UTC)
i agree. it is a portmanteau, but a very poor one. a good portmanteau would link two immanently meaningful words. Factotum ( talk) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.72.149.137 ( talk) 11:24, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
This page is completely wrong and needs to be removed as OR. The Lewis Carroll quote says it is "like" a portmanteau, which is a bag. There are no such things as portmanteau words. The word is, in 99% of the uses, always used for a bag, and only used by websites who are misreading Lewis Carroll as anything but the bag. No legitimate recognized dictionary accepts it as anything but a bag. Lewis Carroll didn't accept it as anything but a bag. Ottava Rima ( talk) 04:19, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
Even ignoring how Carroll used it, the OED cites other examples in precisely the sense you object to back to 1882. Have you read the OED entry? Stephen Turner ( Talk) 17:47, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
For the record, Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged [3] cites "portmanteau word" as being identical in meaning to "blend." The Collegiate dictionary, same site [4] gives a definition of "portmanteau" as "a word or morpheme whose form and meaning are derived from a blending of two or more distinct forms." (Please note that these are subscription services and so may not be generally available for free viewing.) -- Dajagr ( talk) 20:36, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
So wait, are we deleting the article or not? Because I could nominate it for deletion right now if you want. Is that what we've agreed on? Calgary ( talk) 08:37, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
Who exactly is the we here? This discussion seems to have died the death under its own inanition, with no comments for nearl;y 4 months. That seems to indicate there is no urge to delete save from 8va Rima. Smerus ( talk) 09:28, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
The article states It is a common misconception that the word portemanteau was used as slang by Lewis Carroll to describe his use of combing two or more words or word parts to give a combined or loaded new meaning. This is based off of a misreading of a passage in 'Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There'when Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice words from the Jabberwocky, saying, “Well, slithy means lithe and slimy ... You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.” Instead of reading the sentence as an analogy, many have seen it as a statement. The dropping of the word "like" has lead to this misreading.
Undoubtedly, some people have the history of this word wrong. But what is the evidence that this is a "common" misconception? The idea of a "portmanteau word" is often traced to that passage about Humpty-Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass -- I've seen this in a number of books about words. But does the article really need a long paragraph to debunk a "misconception" whose existence has not been established? Daqu ( talk) 05:16, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
I may be foolishly wading into a controversy here. In fact, I almost certainly am. But I've attempted to rewrite the page to recognise both senses of "portmanteau", the specialist linguistic one and the popular one. As I commented in the section This Page is Wrong just above, the OED recognises both senses and provides citations for them. The popular sense is older and includes the original use of portmanteau (as a type of word) and the original use of brunch.
It seems clear to me that the page has lost NPOV recently, condemning the popular sense of portmanteau as a "misconception" and a "misreading" despite its long history and its use in reliable sources. I've tried to be more balanced, explaining both the meanings while being clear that linguists use the words "portmanteau" and "blend" in more specific and distinct senses. I hope I've succeeded in this.
Stephen Turner ( Talk) 12:03, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
There seems to be some confusion here. The wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a dictionary. One of the main differences between an encyclopedia and a dictionary is that an encyclopedia has an entry/article on a particular topic, whereas a dictionary has an entry on a particular word.
In this article, this means that information on the use of portmanteau where it refers to the rights and wrongs of it being about putting multiple words together, must go into a different article than use of the portmanteau to refer to a bag.- ( User) WolfKeeper ( Talk) 17:53, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
See: Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_not_a_dictionary#The_differences_between_encyclopedia_and_dictionary_articles for more details.- ( User) WolfKeeper ( Talk) 17:57, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
The article Portmanteau (suitcase) seems to have been lost somewhere in a series of re-directs. TheRedPenOfDoom ( talk) 18:31, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
I am not sure why you keep trying to insist that a word cannot have two (or more) meanings, even if there was originally one source for the word. Take Spam for a recent example. Originally spam/portmanteau had one meaning. Now it has more. When people use spam/portmanteau, 90% of the time they are clearly referring to one meaning or another- not both. TheRedPenOfDoom ( talk) 21:24, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
Okay, I've reviewed this article's history and talk pages carefully. It began with my intention to create a list of portmanteau words, before realizing there was a redirect, which meant I had to delve into the history and talk pages to see what the contents of that page had been and why it was no more. In the process, I found Category:Portmanteaus, which is fine, but I also noticed that edit warring seems to have prevented this article from addressing:
I agree that characterizing the use of "portmanteau word" as based on a misconception is silly. I agree with the separation of the suitcase article and the word article. I do not support merging this article into Blend, because "portmanteau" obviously has a significant literary context and its place in popular culture will detract from the strictly linguistic-based article on blends. Elle ( talk) 02:37, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
I removed the following from the article
Portmanteaus are frequently used for proper names as well as common nouns, sometimes producing epithets such as "Scalito" (referring to Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia). Here, the purpose for blending is not so much to combine the meanings of the source words but "to suggest a resemblance of one named person to the other" and the effect is often derogatory [1].
Source appears to be a blog and not a reliable source. TheRedPenOfDoom ( talk) 20:02, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
This edit [ [5]] and this edit [ [6]] removed some examples from other languages. While this IS the English WP article, I believe that including at least a few global examples is beneficial to the article. I am particularly intrigued by the place name examples that appear to be as strong and unique tradition as "BLANK-gate"s are becoming in English. (although limiting the number of place names a bit might be in order.)
Does anyone else have any comments? TheRedPenOfDoom ( talk) 17:35, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
The thing is, the (inevitably) random addition of examples from other languages (or indeed additional citations in English) risks making the article a prime example of rambling WP:OR. One way round this would be for someone to start an article List of portmanteau words (the title for which is currently a mere redirect),which could perhaps have sub-headings for different languages, and then folk could add examples (preferably each accompanied by a brief explanation) to their heart's content. And there is nothing preventing an article List of portmanteau place-names if anyone can be bothered. The lists could be cross-referenced within the main article, which would retain its 'encyclopaedic' role of explaining the term.-- Smerus ( talk) 20:39, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
Is there a special term to describe portmanteaux formed from synonymous words, e.g. guesstimate, chillax, confuzzled. Their recent appearance in colloquial English seems to be of note, even if their linguistic value is minimal. Aspirex ( talk) 07:50, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
←I gave Websters above. EB, at "Back-formations and blends", gives:
Blends fall into two groups: (1) coalescences, such as “bash” from “bang” and “smash”; and (2) telescoped forms, called portmanteau words, such as “motorcade” from “motor cavalcade.” In the first group are the words clash, from clack and crash, and geep, offspring of goat and sheep. To the second group belong dormobiles, or dormitory automobiles, and slurbs, or slum suburbs. A travel monologue becomes a travelogue and a telegram sent by cable a cablegram. Aviation electronics becomes avionics; biology electronics, bionics; and nuclear electronics, nucleonics. In cablese a question mark is a quark; in computerese a binary unit is a bit. In astrophysics a quasistellar source of radio energy becomes a quasar, and a pulsating star becomes a pulsar.
- Dan Dank55 ( talk)( mistakes) 02:56, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
There are two definitions in common use: the broad one (synonymous with blend), coined by Lewis Carroll, and the narrow linguistic one (as in “a le” → au).
This is a contentious debate ( WP:CONTROVERSY), as noted by above discussion and history of edits, all the more so because of the extensive list of articles that link to it – I suggest that as per WP:NPOV, we list both senses, prominently, in the lede.
I’ve done so (in this edit), with extensive citations – does this look like an acceptable form?
There is no call to merge, which would confuse. The article as it stands has a reference to the linguistic definition. ('Portmanteau' btw without an 'e' after the first 't').This seems sufficient. Smerus ( talk) 11:27, 26 June 2008 (UTC)
1. corrected typo in Carroll quote. "fumious" to "frumious", which is correct.
2. I believe the appending of "-gate" to scandals dates to whitewater, not watergate. Some clever editor first appended -gate to whitewater, making it whitewatergate. It is only since then that we are plague by this suffix. Can someone check this and make the relevant change in the page? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.215.187.165 ( talk) 06:20, 7 February 2009 (UTC)
Surely there's a limit to these words as actual words or made up stuff. Cellphone is generally accepted but I assume stuff like telethon can't possibly be considered an actual word, right? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Megapeen ( talk • contribs) 04:22, 30 April 2009 (UTC)
The word 'portmanteau' is itself a 'portmanteau word'
Is it? Seems like a compound to me. 72.75.81.72 ( talk) 03:10, 6 July 2009 (UTC)
I'm surprised that neither the article or its talk mentions "Bakerloo", as in London's Bakerloo line. Few people realise that this is a portmanteau word; it is derived from "Baker Street and Waterloo Railway", which opened in March 1906. It's not just a case of the portmanteau being much more well-known than the original name; but in July 1906, the portmanteau was adopted officially by that railway - they dropped the original name completely in 1910. So, I want to add a note; but judging by all the discussion above, it'll get trampled on. Where is the best place for it? -- Redrose64 ( talk) 15:44, 11 August 2009 (UTC)
what is it called when you have a word inside a word for example fan-f******-tastic? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Benjabby ( talk • contribs) 19:34, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
"An example being the well-known portmanteau word "Spanglish", referring to speaking a mix of both Spanish and English at the same time. In this case, there is no logical situation in which the speaker would say "Spanish English" in place of the portmanteau word in the same way they could say "do not" in place of the contraction "don't", or "we are" in place of "we're"."
The example is simply outright wrong. If "Spanglish" is not used, "Spanish English" is a perfectly good alternative. Spanish is an adjective as well as a noun. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.234.8.160 ( talk) 17:34, 21 October 2009 (UTC)