Wretched winter weather has been afflicting large areas of the northern half of the U.S. One response to extreme snow has been to coin portmanteau words for these storms. So far I’ve seen:
snowtastrophe, snowpocalypse, snowmageddon
(Hat tip to Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, who recently returned to California after a holiday in the Northeast — upstate New York, New York City, Boston — with her husband and daughter, escaping just before the weather turned really ugly.)
There’s a pattern to these inventions: snow replaces the first syllable of a multi-syllable word (referring to a dire event) which has its primary accent after the first syllable (so that this word is easily identifiable). So the sources are
snow + (ca)tástrophe, (a)pócalypse, (Ar)magéddon
(and snow has a secondary accent).
December 23, 2008 at 4:55 am |
Anchorage: “Snowzilla Declared a Public Nuisance, Decapitated.” http://www.themudflats.net/2008/12/22/snowzilla-declared-a-public-nuisance-decapitated/
December 24, 2008 at 6:11 pm |
The whimsical British blogger desbladet hs been chronicling the occurrence of the word snökaos in Scandivanian newspapers for at least 5 years now.
Unfortunately his blog at
http://piginawig.diaryland.com/081104.html
is not searchable as far as I can tell.
He moved to the Netherlands 2 years ago, so now he documents the word in Dutch papers too.
December 24, 2008 at 6:29 pm |
To Gary: and in German too (“Schneekaos”). But none of these are portmanteaus. They’re just noun-noun compounds (meaning ‘chaos having to do with snow’), which as is customary in these languages are written as single words. Plenty of hits for “snow chaos” in English (which is parallel to “snow catastrophe”).
December 27, 2008 at 7:02 pm |
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