Perhaps you've been in this situation before. You bump into your neighbor on your way in or out and you get to talking and they say something like, "Yeah, money's a little tight this year. We might have to stick around here and have a staycation.", or you're talking to someone at the office and they say, "Look at this pretty necklace Bill gave me for our monthaversary." If you're anything like me, you feel yourself caught somewhere between the urge to cringe, and the urge to grab the nearest pair of scissors and go to work on their tongue while screaming, "Hold still dammit! You don't deserve the ability to speak!" Okay, maybe you're nothing like me.
They're called portmanteau words, which I'm told is itself a french example of such a word. I'll have to take their word for it, since I don't speak French. A portmanteau word is the bastard child formed from the illicit union of two legitimate words. It it is not a compound word, like "doghouse" or "chalkboard", because in those cases, the original words are left intact. Portmanteau words are the result of a messy butchering and splicing process, the sort of thing you'd expect to find in the basement of a psychopathic mad scientist. The entrails of etymology splatter the walls. If you break down a word like "evacuation" into its different components you can trace them back to their Latin roots. The creators of portmanteau words couldn't care less this about this sort of thing. Search for the roots of "jazzercise" or "ghettolicious" and you'll find nothing but nonsense. The mad scientist sews the heart of one word to the spleen of another. Basic anatomy is none of his concern. It's all about cuteness and flow. So you end up with a word like "evacucation", which I'm just going to go ahead and declare is a vacation where you end up spending most of it sitting on the toilet. (They told you not to drink the water.)
It's not easy for these illegitimate children, born out of the wedlock of proper syntax. They are spawned indiscriminately by any fool with a mouth. Some of them catch on, most of them are quickly left to return to the groan-inducing dust from whence they came. "Workaholic" is certainly an inspiring success story for words like "bromance" and "sexting" which are still struggling to make their mark. Hell, even spellcheck apparently recognizes it as a proper word, and it doesn't even recognize itself! Then you have words like "motel" which have enjoyed respectable society for so long, they've forgotten when they came from.
They say necessity is the mother of invention and the portmanteau word demonstrates this to a fault....then it won't shut up...then we start dropping hints that it's time for it to leave...then eventually we threaten to call the cops if it doesn't stop with the corny jokes. But the portmanteau never takes the hint. "Look at the time!", it says, "We've been up all night. I could stick around and maybe we could have brunch together. Get it!? It's like "breakfast" and "lunch" put together. Hee Hee!" Oh portmanteau word, don't make me kill you.
I'll admit that some of them fill a legitimate void. Some of them are even pretty catchy. But for every word like "televangelist", you get fifty other words like "shart" or "procrasturbate." Seriously? And "guesstimate" just has to go. It's either an estimate or a guess you stupid excuse for a word! You're either pretty sure, or you're taking a complete shot in the dark. You can't be both. The bottom line on most of these words is that they're just incredibly lame. Someone out there thinks they're being cute or clever, or maybe they're just plain lazy, and then some other idiot decides to run with it and we all have to endure words like "frenemy", hoping that they die a quick painful death. Oh well, as long as they don't start using nouns like "antique" as verbs. Oh...really? Well, that's just craptabulous.
