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)
• 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!