Airigami

Today I happened upon the portmanteau word airigami, air + origami. It's a word artist Larry Moss uses to describe "the fine art of folding air." In this case, the air is encased in latex balloons, large and small.

Larry Moss creates some interesting and astounding things with just a little latex and a lot of air — from large animals and full-length gowns to fairy tale scenes and renditions of famous paintings.

Here's the Mona Lisa, though there's a special place in my heart for the Jackson Pollock reproduction

To a nerd like me, this is just so cool! But it got me wondering what other types of "gami"s might still be available for a struggling artist.

If I were, for example, to fold pictures of Ben Stein into mediocre paper animals, would it be bore-igami?

Or if I carve images into spent apples, would the resultant works be called core-igami?

Or if I twist and squeeze and tie fresh intestines, bladders, and other viscera into the shapes of the animals they came from, would it be gore-igami?

Aah, that's enough. We don't need any more-igami.

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.

advertorial

advertorial = advertisement + editorial

In print publishing, an advertorial is an advertisement "disguised" as an editorial or other article. There might actually be some informational content in there, but it is all bent toward convincing the reader to buy a particular product.

I suppose I really should stop being surprised by how old some of these portmanteau words are, as if only in the last 30 years or so have people used and enjoyed wordplay. Advertorial has appeared in dictionaries my entire life and has been in use since before my grandfathers were born. It appears, for instance, unabashedly in the May 1914 issue of Kansas City's The Rotarian (page 14) in a subtitle: "A Word to the Women Folk: An Advertorial by Kansas City's Rotary Ad Man."

Outside of the world of marketing, a lay person might not be so gallant to announce that an article is really an advertorial. I, for one, find it difficult to even think, much less say, the word advertorial without rolling my eyes. There's more than enough real stuff to read, I don't need to waste my time getting knee-deep in an advertorial before I realize I should just turn the page.

Other Google Book searches turned up a number of false positives, which is a frustrating find. There were a few actual positives from the 19th century. I didn't look at all of them, but a sample shows that many of these either (a) are in Latin or (b) use advertorial to mean something akin to adversarial.

Had I a decent historical dictionary nearby, I might look to see if this was a common use of this word. But I don't. So I can't.

scanlation

scanlation = scan + translation

I just discovered this one today in this About.com article. Scanlation refers to illegally scanning, translating, and posting online manga, including brand new, hot-off-the-presses manga books from Japan. It's a lot like what Google Books is doing, only there's no patina of working with publishers or doing it for the greater good. Scanlation sites now get enough visitors to make them profitable, through ad posting. None of these profits are shared with publishers or manga authors, and the newly formed Japanese Digital Comic Association claims that legitimate manga publishers are losing money to these sites.

Scanlation is digital piracy, plain and simple.

A warning about the link above: The article highlights some user comments about the issue. These can be very frustrating. As always there are those who think that (a) everything on the Internet should be free; (b) everything in print should be on the Internet; and (c) publishing is not and shouldn't be a profit-making endeavor. Whenever I read comments like that, I just have to try to imagine that whoever posted it has never had a job.

churnalism

churnalism = churn + journalism

An apt portmanteau for the result of the Internet's 24-hour news cycle. There are people out there who are gainfully employed in churning out "journalism" based on press releases and Twitter memes, often without any fact-checking or corroboration.

The fate of news agencies in the Web 2.0 age is in flux. Some believe that paid journalists will soon be a thing of the past, since everyone and their mother can (and does) post "news" as soon as it happens, and that news is then proliferated across the Web.

I can only hope that this is will not be the case. We need honest-to-blog investigative journalists to get the real story and check the facts, or we will quickly be led astray. Twitter and its ilk does have its place in disseminating information -- though it sometimes is misinformation -- but it cannot replace true journalism.

As Mashable CEO and founder Pete Cashmore recently put it: "I first learned Michael Jackson died on Twitter, but I also learned Justin Bieber died on Twitter."

Find out more about churnalism from Word Spy.

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.

tragicomedy

tragicomedy (or tragi-comedy) = tragic + comedy

I am totally surprised by how old this portmanteau word is. In fact, it's older than the phrase portmanteau word! It goes back at least to the 17th century, when British poet Abraham Cowley penned "Colonel Tuke's Tragi-Comedy, The Adventures of Five Hours." It appears in 1822's The British Poets. Including Translations. Volume XIII: Cowley, Vol. I. In this case, I think "translation" means that the spelling and punctuation have been standardized (but hopefully not bowdlerized), considering how closely the spelling and punctuation of this poem matches today's expectations compared with other written works of the 17th century.

At any rate, here's the poem in its entirety:

Colonel Tuke's Tragicomedy,

The Adventures of Five Hours

As when our kings (lords of the spacious main)
Take in just wars a rich plate-fleet of Spain,
The rude unshapen ingots they reduce
Into a form of beauty and of use;
On which the conqueror's image now does shine,
Not his whom it belong'd to in the mine:
So, in the mild contentions of the Muse
(The war which Peace itself loves and pursues)
So have you home to us in triumph brought
The cargason of Spain with treasures fraught.
You have not basely gotten it by stealth,
Nor by translation borrow'd all its wealth;
But by a powerful spirit made it your own;
Metal before, money by you 'tis grown.
'Tis current now, by your adorning it
With the fair stamp of your victorious wit.
  But, though we praise this voyage of your mind,
And though ourselves enrich'd by it we find;
We're not contented yet, because we know
What greater stores at home within it grow.
We've seen how well you foreign ores refine;
Produce the gold of your own nobler mine:
The world shall then our native plenty view,
And fetch materials for their wit from you;
They all shall watch the travails of your pen,
And Spain on you shall make reprisals then.

freemium

freemium = free + premium

A price structure that offers a basic product for free, but gives the opportunity to pay for premium services. Examples of freemium pricing include Second Life, Disqus, Pirate Quest, and bit.ly.

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.

edutainment, edutainer

edutainment = education + entertainment
edutainer = educator + entertainer

Edutainment may just be the polar opposite of the infomercial. Instead of trying to sell me something (which I hate) under the guise of giving me information (which I'm okay with), edutainment focuses on giving information (which I'm okay with) under the guise of having fun (which everybody loves). Where infomercials disguise a bad thing with a good one, edutainment disguises a good thing with a better one.

Edutainer isn't used quite as often, but I stumbled on it today in a story about Texas blockheads:

Bill Nye, the harmless children’s edu-tainer known as “The Science Guy,” managed to offend a select group of adults in Waco, Texas at a presentation, when he suggested that the moon does not emit light, but instead reflects the light of the sun.

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!

Frappuccino

Frappuccino = frappe + cappuccino

If you don't know what a Frappuccino is, you're missing out. A Frappuccino is Starbuck's deeeeeelicious blend of a little coffee, a lot of milk, a little flavoring, and a lot of ice, all blended together in a yummy caffeinated cool-down drink.

No. I'm not on Starbuck's payroll; I do really love Frappuccinos. But, you know, if someone wants to throw some advertising bucks my way, I wouldn't complain. Or just a free Frappuccino. I'm such a whore.

I used to make my own version of the Frappuccino at home. I had it down pretty well, too. I called it the "Andyccino."

graffitree

graffitree = graffiti + tree

A tree in which some ragamuffin or lovelorn adolescent has carved something worth immortalizing on a piece of nature. Flickr holds a large collection of photographs of graffitrees, profound and profane.

Graffitree is also a Clothing Company in India.

automagically

automagically = automatic(ally) + magically

automagically: How something works when you don't know how it works, or when you don't want to have to explain every minute detail. Automagically is very useful when you're trying to explain software or the Internet or Twitter to someone who is totally ignorant about technology.

"Enter up to 140 characters, press Enter, and whatever you typed is automagically viewable by everyone in the world who wants to look at it. And, honestly, thousands of people really want to know when you're changing your adult diaper."

bromance

bromance = brother + romance

Depending on where I've heard the word, bromance has been used to indicate both a homosexual and a heterosexual relationship between two men. Either way, this is a word that can disappear for good as far as I'm concerned.