Stiction. Rubbage. Tofurkey. Cockapoo.
As we’ve seen here recently in our “World of Weird Words,” these oddball terms are known as blends. According to Wikipedia, this common linguistic phenomenon involves joining the sound and/or meaning from pieces of two or more existing words.
For example: Dumbfound mixes dumb and confound. And in druthers, the last letter of would is added to a slang corruption of rather — thus designating what one “would prefer” (as in, “If I had my druthers…”).
Believe it or not, we’re on the subject of blends — also called portmanteaux — for our third week, because the English language has literally hundreds of such words.
With some debt to Dictionary.com, Wikipedia and the Online Etymology Dictionary, here’s a final set we haven’t covered yet:
Splatter mixes splash and spatter, while stash likely comes from stow and cache. The German Gestapo is a triple-blend, contracting Geheime Staats-polizei, which literally means “German secret police.” And the oft-used internet also is a blend, combining the prefix inter- (“between”) and of course, network.
I particularly love one of Huck Finn’s favorite nouns for “stuff” or “junk” — namely, rubbage, a mix of rubbish and garbage. While it never officially entered our language, it’s used eight times in Twain’s masterpiece, and that’s good enough for me.
Indeed, when I used to teach Huck Finn at Loyalsock, I used rubbage as a vocab-skill builder. Since it isn’t in the dictionary, they have to figure it out from context — which is actually how we learn most of our words. And I would then proceed to employ rubbage as a jumping-off point for digging up other portmanteaux.
In this internet scavenger hunt, my students would usually key in on food and animals — as in the following:
Cronut is an obvious (and tasty) blend of croissant and donut; the term is actually a trademark, having been invented by French pastry chef Dominique Ansel.
Broccoflower is another obvious blend that probably won’t hit big with meat-lovers. Likewise, tofurkey is (as you might guess) a turkey substitute made with tofu — while the triple-blend turducken consists of “a deboned chicken stuffed into a deboned duck, further stuffed into a deboned turkey.” That’s from Wikipedia, which adds gooducken as essentially the same thing — but with goose instead of turkey.
As for animals, we must mention such mixed breeds as the zedonk (zebra + donkey), tiglon and liger (both blending tiger and lion), beefalo (part cow, part buffalo) and any number of doggie hybrids — whose origins my readers can puzzle out for themselves: puggle, chorkie, cockapoo and of course, labradoodle. (Trust me — there are many others.)
In the realm of science, we have quasar, a shortening of quasi-stellar — because that type of “radio source” was the first quasar discovered. Along the same lines, pulsar shortens pulsating star, while transistor condenses transfer resistor. And the terrific blend stiction (static and friction) is, according to Dictonary.com, “the frictional force to be overcome to set one object in motion when it is in contact with another.”
Medically, there is vitamin, borrowing the Latin vita- (which means life and gives us many other words), along with amine — because these were once thought to contain amino acids. And let’s not forget the trademark Botox, which — believe it or not — is related to botulism and toxin. So … remind me why anyone would want to put this in their body?
A few blends also pertain to politics — among which we might point to Brexit, stagflation and shrinkflation, along with any number of examples using the suffix –(on)omics — such as Reaganomics and Bidenomics, to name just two.
Sticking with politics, another famous example comes from one-time Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin: In a long-ago tweet, she accidentally conflated refute and repudiate to create the comical refudiate — which in 2010 went on to be named “Word of the Year” by the New Oxford American Dictionary.
Interestingly, something similar emerged at Loyalsock when two of my students independently (and inadvertently, I hope) combined a pair of well-known terms to create pedestool — which really should also get some kind of honor, if you ask me.
On a final and more timely note: For the midweek publication of Webb, I usually write these columns on the previous Wednesday; so when I took a break from my laptop on 6/19 and went out to fetch my nonexistent mail that day, I suddenly remembered another seasonal blend-word: Juneteenth, our national holiday that honors the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Too bad I’m mentioning it seven days after the actual observation!
Oh, well; as with the American Abolitionist victory — which lagged behind Britain by nearly 30 years — better late than never, right?
