Data points: portmanteaus 8/3/10

I realize I’m probably way late for these particular trains, but here are three portmanteaus from yesterday’s NYT Magazine that caught my eye.

From Peggy Orenstein’s “I Tweet, Therefore I Am”:

… publishers, scrambling to promote 360,000-character tomes in a 140-character world, push authors to rally their “tweeps” to the cause. (p. 11)

That’s tweeps ‘followers of someone’s tweets’, from tweets + peeps ‘people, posse, gang’ (sometimes said to be a “gangsta” or “gansta” word, though it’s pretty well escaped the gangsta world of its origins).

And:

… I appreciate good wreiting whatever the form: some “tweeple” are as deft as haiku masters at their craft. (p. 12)

That’s tweet + people.

Then from Virginia Heffernan’s “Unnatural Science: The uses and abuses of science blogging”:

In farewell posts [to the ScienceBlogs collective], the bloggers charged that the advertorial [from “Food Frontiers, a nutrition blog that PepsiCo paid to have on the site”] was deceptive and undermined the purpose of the collective. (p. 16)

I was of course familiar with infomercial, which Heffernan also uses in her piece, but I happen not to have noticed advertorialadvertisement + editorial — before. No doubt it’s been around for years; certainly, advertorials have.

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