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SOCIETY OF CONFUSING ANTICIPATION
Word-building Jabberwocky
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Silly, Nonsense and Children's authors include Lewis Carroll.
Various meaningful concepts are now named after his writings,
and some of the words he made up have by now made it into dictionaries.
James Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake" is very dense indeed in made-up words,
among other things. It takes many readings to decypher what Joyce is expressing in this work.
Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" also contains many made-up words.
This is moreover a political commentary with quite a lot of philosophical meaning to it.
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A portmanteau is a blend of two words, often the front end of one followed by the back end of another.
For instance, in Lewis Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky", the Borogroves are mimsy, meaning "miserable and flimsy".
mi -s-e-r-a-b-l-e- -f-l- imsy.
But let us first talk about various particular forms of made up word, starting with the portmanteau. 😄
Does Bakerloo use all of "Baker"?
It's a priori ambiguous:
Baker- loo or Bak -erloo are both possible syllabic splits💂♂️💂♂️💂♂️
Let's spot some examples in real life.
Brunch = breakfast + lunch.
Smog = smoke + fog ...
This fortnight's theme is portmanteaux about cats!
For a cat stretching so as to pass through an ajar door, we have the verb
to fuzzcordion, from fuzzy + accordion 🐱
We also have
puritone = purr + baritone for a gentler roar from a Big Cat🐆
Incidentally, portmanteau itself means a type of suitcase that opens up into
two equal halves held together by hinges. It is literally a coat carrier in French.
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Would any other people here like to point out portmanteau words?
Invent any portmanteau words?
A portmanteau looks to have two equal halves, say with a different 'coat' word in each half.
But 'portmanteau' is not quite itself a portmanteau.
For the entirety of the coat part, 'manteau' is present, rather than both of the input words being contracted somewhat.
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One of the Fortune Teller's Pigeon email started with:
"The Cat of Callisthenics, Her Angoraestheic profusion of fur screens Her sleekly-muscled extensible body,
a veritable fuzzcordion in stroll, concealing so much potential to artfully pivot and pounce!
The Balls of Wool so welcome the pawcushion (...)"
What can we say about the made-up words here?
In case you are wondering, callisthenics is an actual, if uncommon word: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dict…/english/callisthenics
From kallis (beauty) as in Callisto and sthenos (strength; literally one of the Gorgon monsters).
angoraesthetic: in the pleasing physical form of an Angora Cat: with long and slightly curly fur.
fuzzcordion: cats are rather extendible and fuzzy, like accordions covered in fur...
pawcushion: the patter of padded paws; is also a phonetic pun on percussio
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Enother Fortune Teller's Pigeon email took the following form:
[Insert image of the duck message here]
Our first comment is that this is in the shape of a duck;
the footnotes are indeed the webbed feet!
Compare Lewis Carroll's tale about a mouse: in the shape of a tail:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mouse%27s_Tale…
As to Ducksanctuaruel, this is a local word.
A 3-tally portmanteau of duck, sanctuary and Emmanuel:
the College containing a duck sanctuary,
by which adorable presences (and elsewise) it is nlso a sanctuary college for people...
We consider it acceptable for the entirety of monosyllabic words to feature in portmanteuax.
For a silly footnote
that itself has a silly footnote,
we coin the name a `pratchett'.
After Terry Pratchett, who quite often used this form.
With a small p, in the sense that abelian group or
hermitian matrix are more honorific than capitalized counterparts would be.
Except that in this modern Gen-Z age, it is very easy to colour in shaped texts.
Indeed, this message is more in the coloration of a male mallard 🦆 than in the shape of one!
An n-tally portmanteau is one made from the front of a word, n - 2 progressively middle parts of words and the end of a word.
A 2- tally portmanteau is just a portmanteau.
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The word n-tally portmanteau was of course coined by a Natalie Portman fan club.
As such, can you form an n-tally portmanteau about Natalie Portman, dear readers? 😁
Bonus if the n-tally is about n of the feathers flying off her Black Swan costume
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Swan_(film)…
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