A weekend cartoon from Hilary Price, with a pun on thong and the thon part of the libfix -athon:
Well, it’s complicated. Price is making a pun. But if the guy who’s speaking were a real person, rather than a character in a cartoon, we might see walk-a-thong as an eggcorn, a kind of misunderstanding that improves on the meaning of walkathon, with the speaker then acting on the supposition that thongs were involved in a walking event.
Or if someone announced a Walk-a-Thong as an event, then we might see walk-a-thong as a kind of intentional portmanteau, of the substitution type (analogous to inadvertent substitution blends), so that it would be understood as combining the meanings of walkathon and thong as well as their forms, to produce a new item meaning something like ‘walkathon in a thong’.
It all depends on who’s speaking and what they have in their heads.
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