Today's word: Grillstravaganziculuraristiclyishous

But first, a personal note: February is finally over! This has been one of the busiest and most stressful months — and especially this last week — that I've been through in a long time. But I made it through, and I am out the other side and can breathe and write and relax again!

But on to today's word.

Grammar Nazis of the 21st Century: A Proposal

A Grammar Nazi, in case you didn't know, is someone who constantly corrects (sometimes erroneously) other people's grammar and usage. In the blogosphere, the Grammar Nazi is a special breed of troll who pounces on the merest errors, typos, oversights, and brain farts and calls them out, often in the harshest way, in the comments.

And rather often, the "errors" that these Grammar Nazis point out aren't even mistakes, like in this post, when someone objected to my use of "none sound right" instead of "none sounds right." (In this case, I actually knew the guy who posted it, so I didn't skewer him publicly. He'll make a better friend than an enemy.)

spectaculavaganza

spectaculavaganza = spectacular + extravaganza

Spotted in the wild here: "Last night, during the one-hour LeBron James Spectaculavaganza on ESPN, James was shown video of his jersey being burned by Cleveland fans . . ."

There's also a proofreading error in the picture's caption, if they haven't fixed it yet. See if you can find it.

spillionaire

spillionaire = spill + millionaire

A spillionaire is a lawyer who makes a ton of money suing or defending big oil following an oil spill, or a person who receives a large settlement because of an oil spill.

I had presumed that this was coined recently in the wake of the BP oiling-the-Gulf fiasco, but Word Spy has a citation from 1999, referring to the Exxon Valdez spill.

Paliban

Paliban = Palin + Taliban

I don't know if it was his coinage or not, but twitterer @alexanderchee (via @hangingnoodles), linking to a Huffington Post article titled "Sarah Palin: American Law Should be 'Based on the God of the Bible and the Ten Commandments," referred to Mrs. Palin's response to the protests over the National Day of Prayer as "The Paliban Platform."

For people out there who have had a difficult time understanding how a hard-line religious group like the Taliban could manage to gain power over an entire country and create a strict theocracy, you should follow Mrs. Palin's exploits. The only difference is the religion involved.

aquapocalypse

aquapocalypse = aqua + apocalypse

Aquapocalypse  was used recently to describe the effects of the water main break in Boston over the weekend. Hopefully, the aquapocalypse is almost over.

I will eventually get around to writing about the use of apocalypse and armageddon in portmanteaus, but for now, I have to get back to work.

nontroversy

nontroversy (or non-troversy) = non + controversy

Nontroversy is one of those perfect portmanteaus because it is only one letter off from the word it mimics. A nontroversy is a news story that is raised as being controversial, though it really isn't. A nontroversy is, by definition, nontroversial.

As Mark Peters puts it on his Wordtastic blog, nontroversy is "A useful word for the proliferation of useless stories."

An example, from Twitter's @cynicaldragon:

nothing liked a whipped up non-troversy to get the twitterati chattering #bigotgate

You can find a more evidence of nontroversy in the wild over at Word Spy.

frankenword

frankenword = Frankenstein + word

Like Frankenstein's monster, frankenwords are "unnatural" creations formed by sewing together bits and pieces of other, separate things -- words in one case, body parts in another.

Frankenword is nearly synonymous with portmanteau. Frankenword, however, goes a little beyond squishing two words together and encompasses the mixing of roots and affixes that aren't necessarily recognizeable as separate words. For example, tacking a Greek suffix (like -ize) onto the end of a Latin root word (like public) to create a word in English (publicize) that doesn't seem to have an etymological home.

But your average portmanteau is also considered a frankenword.


Jan Freeman wrote about frankenwords in more depth (and with more beauty) in the Boston Globe on Sunday, starting with various -athons (e.g., walkathons) and moving on to electrocute, automobile, various -aholics, and others. It's certainly worth a read.

innovention

innovention = innovation + invention

A totally redundant word brought to you by the good people of 30Rock. Keep 'em coming, NBC!

fauxliday

fauxliday = faux + holiday -- a fake holiday

@CopyCurmudgeon today tweeted this:

"April Fools' Day: One of my least favorite fauxlidays. But at least it taught me that @APStylebook has an entry for Aqua-Lung. For reals."

In Great Britain,  holiday not describes a day of special significance and observance, but also what Americans call a vacation. When a Brit isn't at work when he normally should be, he is likely "on holiday."

The American "translation" of that sort of fauxliday is a fakecation.

teabonics

teabonics = tea (party) + ebony + phonics

A big thank you to whoever created this Flickr photostream to collect the "creative" spelling and grammar so often seen on TEA Party protest signs.

Teabonics is intended to sound like ebonics, which is itself a relatively established portmanteau of ebony and phonics.

prostidude

prostidude = prostitute + dude, i.e., a male prostitute

This word comes to us as America's first legal male prostitute leaves his Nevada brothel, as Language Log reports.

Catastrotea, Tea-pocalypse

catastrotea = catastrophe + tea
Tea-pocalypse = tea + apocalypse

"These Argo Tea baristas are joking about creating 'Catastrotea.' This is how the tea-pocalypse starts."

From Mark Peters via @wordlust.

Globish

Globish = global + English

Globish was apparently coined in 2007 by French-speaking retired IBM executive Jean-Paul Nerriere. He noticed that a sort of "decaffeinated English" was becoming the lingua franca of international business and politics. It's "decaffeinated" because non-English-speakers have assembled only enough of an understanding of English to use it to communicate with other non-English-speakers, though it isn't as rich as British and American English are.

He noticed in Japan that non-English-speakers were communicating more effectively with other non-English-speakers than with the Americans or the British, even though they (the non-English-speakers) were using a subset of the English language to communicate. Nerriere dubbed this new means of communication Globish.

Robert McCrum will soon be publishing a book called Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language, which details Nerriere's story and goes into further depth about how English is spreading throughout the world. You can read more about it in his blog post, which also features this wonderful photo that seems to define irony:

hegan

hegan = he (as in male) + vegan

This portmanteau appeared in a Boston Globe article on March 24, 2010, and was used to describe "men in their 40s and 50s embracing a restrictive lifestyle to look better, rectify a gluttonous past, or cheat death."

There was a time in our not-to-distant past in which we moved away from names that designated gender: stewardesses became flight attendants, firemen became fire fighters, mailmen became postal workers, and the famous faces you see on the silver screen are of actors, regardless of what reproductive organs they were born with. Although it sometimes got a little weird and iffy (ombudsperson, anyone?), it generally made our language more compact, equitable, and malleable.

Why, oh why, then, would someone see a need to take an already gender-neutral term like vegan and create a new gender-specific term? Why the backward step?

I recognize that the author was trying to be witty and creative with her (yes, her) language. I just think this particular choice was a bad idea. I hope hegan doesn't catch on.

Thanks to @CopyCurmudgeon for pointing this out to me on Twitter.

Lizaster

Lizaster = Liz + disaster

Used on NBC's 30 Rock on March 18, 2010. Tina Fey's character, Liz Lemon, rushes into Jack Donaghy's (Alec Baldwin's) office, asking for help: "It's a Liz relationship emergency. It's a Lizaster."

Catch some video from 30 Rock at NBC.com.

vagazzercise

vagazzercise = vaginal + jazz + exercise

Following the rise to prominence of the portmanteau word vagazzle, radio's Bob & Tom put together a moderately funny fake commercial for a vagazzercising class in which vagazzled (and apparently bottomless?) women did pelvic thrusts and squats, etc., as a group. The women's sweat interfered with the glue holding their vagazzle rhinestones in place, causing them (the rhinestones, not the women) to shoot around the room like shiny little bullets.

A recording of the fake commercial isn't currently on the Bob & Tom Web site, but it might be soon.

vagazzle

vagazzle = vagina + bedazzle

Although I'm not entirely certain that she coined the word, Jennifer Love Hewitt recently brought the word to the fore when she told George Lopez on live TV that she was "currently vagazzled," that is, she had shaved her pubic area and glued jewels (or rhinestones) above and around her mommy parts.

Remember the days when a girl shaving her pubic hair into a shape was considered risque at best and lewd at worst? Well, ladies, you've come a long way.

nameonics

nameonics = name + mnemonics

In advertising, nameonics is all about creating a memorable name for a product in some way or another. The word popped up today in a NYT article about Vanguard trying to make Vanguarding a common investment term (the way googling and xeroxing have become words in their own right).

There's an interesting article by Jerry Steuber here about how nameonics works, or at least how it could work. I don't doubt Jerry's claim that he made the word nameonics up on his own, but I doubt that he was the first to do so. Some things, like gravity and portmanteau words, are so obvious to someone who's looking for them that they can be "discovered" independently by more than one person.

Vancouverage

Vancouverage: Vancouver + coverage

Coined by the Colbert Report folks as a handy, non-copyright-violating name of their Vancouver 2010 Olympics coverage.

From Ostrow Off the Record

Due to copyright restrictions and out of fear of being sued by NBC, Colbert is calling his effort "THE COLBERT REPORT" EXCLUSIVE VANCOUVERAGE OF THE 2010 QUADRENNIAL COLD WEATHER ATHLETIC COMPETITION. His catchphrase, naturally, is "DEFEAT THE WORLD!"