Tag Archives: portmanteau words

-Punk, -Core, and Portmanteaus

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So you thought punk was something that had its vogue years ago and has disappeared since. Or maybe you just hope it has.

It’s true that you don’t hear much about punk music anymore, but punk is alive and well in the fictional world. As long as it’s combined with something else, that is. There is, as far as I know, no strictly punk genre of stories and books. But there are cyberpunk, steampunk, and even stonepunk and solarpunk.

(All of these are “portmanteau words,” squished-together words or sounds that combine two meanings to create a new one. Think smog, webinar, bromance, brunch, or spork (which I still call a runcible spoon). Or, given the time of year, spooktacular. But I digress.)

These varieties of fiction share the sensibilities of punk such as rebellion, individualism, social inequality, and unconventional thinking. (Less screaming, feedback, and safety pin piercings, though. Thank goodness.)

Most people’s introduction to the hyphenpunk world was a 1984 (appropriately) science fiction novel, Neuromancer, by William Gibson. It presented a dark, gritty, dystopian society in which a killer AI invaded people’s brains. At the time it served as a warning, which apparently we have not heeded. (Since then, almost all -punk fiction has been sci-fi or fantasy. At least I haven’t seen any romancepunk or mysterypunk. Again, thank goodness. But I digress again.)

Cyberpunk didn’t start any fashion trends the way punk music did (using the word “fashion” loosely). But another iteration of -punk has: steampunk. Steampunk combines Victorian-era technology and problems with a sense of adventure and invention and owes a lot to the writing of Jules Verne. You’ll find air battles between pirates in blimps, steam-powered robots pieced together from spare parts, and plots involving gaslighting (the streetlamp kind, not the manipulative kind). It’s a celebration of innovation, progress, and developing technology combined with nostalgia for a time when science was exciting, not threatening, and possibilities for advancement seemed limitless. Steampunk, unlike cyberpunk, is uplifting.

Nowadays, you can see steampunk aficionados at clubs and sci-fi conventions dressing in Victorian garb, embellished with brass gears, gauges, and wheels. One trendy accessory is the top hat with welding goggles as a hatband. Women can dress as aviators (aviatrixes? aviatrices?) with, obviously, aviator goggles. One would assume that the expected reaction from those not in the know is goggling at them. (Sorry, not sorry.)

(And that stonepunk and solarpunk I mentioned? Those refer to fiction that immerses the reader in a Flintstones-like past and a back-to-the-land agrarian setting respectively, with technology based on those eras. But I digress still more.)

Now on to -core, another element used in portmanteau words related to the music scene, rather than fiction. As you might guess, the word “hardcore” is the origin of the term. But instead of referring to pornography, -core applies to an extreme expression of any kind of music. Skacore. Thrashcore. Even emocore, unlikely as that sounds. (Theoretically, you could have punkcore music, but I’ve never heard that term used. Nor punkpunk fiction, for that matter. There is a subset of country music called cowpunk, so I guess you could have cowpunkcore. But I digress even more.)

Historical note: Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass pioneered the creation of portmanteau words. (A portmanteau is “a case or bag to carry clothing in while traveling, especially a leather trunk or suitcase that opens into two halves.” So portmanteau, when it comes to words, is actually a metaphor.) Carroll’s epic poem “Jabberwocky” contained several. Slithy (as in “the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe”) is, he said, a combination of lithe and slimy; frumious, a mashing-together of furious and fuming; and chortle, a portmanteau of chuckle and snort that is still used today.

(Less historical note: Thanks to the book The Annotated Alice (annotations by Martin Gardner), which I highly recommend, I learned how to recite the first verse of “Jabberwocky” in French, a skill with no practical applications whatsoever. But I digress. My last digression for this post. I promise.)

(Just kidding. Bonus digression. Back to -punk and -core. There exists a series of books that combines steampunk, thriller, and fantasy. (A Study in Silks (The Baskerville Affair)). Steampunk-Holmes-demoncore, I guess you’d call it.)

BOLO: The Word Crimes Just Keep Coming!

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“Word Crimes” was a big hit for Weird Al Yankovic, ttto “Blurred Lines,” a song that needed the Weird Al treatment if one ever did. But there are lots more word crimes that never made it into the song, likely because to get radio play, a song has to be under four minutes long. In my life as an editor, I see word crimes that are 182 pages long.

Now back to that “ttto.” It may be fairly easy to decode that as “to the tune of,” just from context. IMHO, AFAIK, BTW, and IIRC are becoming common enough online acronyms, but what are we to do with TH:TBotFA? Or THGttG (sometimes written as THHGttG). I know we all could sit here for hours and make up things that they could stand for, but there are better things to do, like petting the cat or helping the needy.

If you are at all familiar with geek culture, you may know that these acronyms are movie and book titles – The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies and The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, respectively. It’s bad enough that you sound like a noob (newbie) (neophyte) if you ask what ST:TOS means (Star Trek: The Original Series – you know, the one with Captain Kirk). But we fancy literary types don’t inflict acronyms on others. We don’t say FftMC when we mean Far from the Madding Crowd or TCoL49 for The Crying of Lot 49.

Perhaps the most annoying acronym of all is STFUATMM (or more politely, SUATMM. STFU is familiar to all but the most genteel, who abbreviate it as SU, but ATMM is more problematic, since this time no one bothers with lowercase letters to help you guess articles, conjunctions, and the like. No, this phrase is “Shut (the fuck) Up And Take My Money,” which means, “You don’t have to say another word; you had me at ‘buy.'”

Full disclosure: I must admit that in my other blog (bipolarjan.wordpress.com), I do use the acronym YMMV, or “Your Mileage May Vary,” to indicate that my experiences should not be generalized to everyone.

Another language trend which has gotten out of hand is “portmanteau words” –two words squashed together to make a new word with a meaning that combines them both.  (A portmanteau is a cross between a trunk and a suitcase.) Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, was, if not the inventor, surely a most prolific coiner of portmanteaus. The appear everywhere in his classic poem “Jabberwocky” – “slithy,” meaning “lithe” and “slimy,” for instance, or one that the English language has retained: “chortle,” from “chuckle” and “snort.” It’s just so damn useful.

“Brunch” and “motel” are useful portmanteaus too, but advertising has taken such words too far. I suppose it’s too late to kill off “sale-a-bration,” but can we call a moratorium on “transfarency” (airline usage) and “unjection” (prescription medicine)? Bon appe-cheese? Trucksicle?  And anything that ends in “-licious” or “-tastic”?

And while we’re on the subject of advertising, can we please stop having Washington and Lincoln dancing around for Presidents Day sales? It’s undignified, first of all, and there is no known connection between the leaders of our country and linens, unless you credit the rumors that Washington slept virtually everywhere.

You could, I suppose, make a connection between Washington and nurseries that sell cherry trees, but even that would be bogus and nurseries’ advertising budgets are not huge. (They spend it all on catalogues.)

Not to worry, though. Even if we manage to eliminate these heinous crimes, there are plenty of others in existence and soon to be created. Among the ones that make me shudder are weather-related portmanteaus like “Snowpocalypse” and “Snowmageddon”; “gifted” to mean “gave someone a present”; and most words that end in “ize.” And don’t even get me started on the way my husband pronounces “foliage” when he reads those nursery catalogues. Or how “catalogue,” “dialogue,” and “doughnut” are spelled these days. Or…or…or…