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Admanteaus

In my mail this morning, two advertising portmanteaus back to back:

Woot.com’s Shirtoberfest has shirt substituting for the first syllable of Octoberfest. Beautorium is a bit more interesting, since it’s a telescoping portmanteau of the compound beauty emporium.

Ad writers are fond indeed of portmanteaus.

This entry was posted on October 10, 2011 at 10:08 am and is filed under Language in advertising, Portmanteaus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Admanteaus”

  1. arnold zwicky Says:
    October 10, 2011 at 3:19 pm | Reply

    From Stan Carey on Google+:

    Presumably beautorium is pronounced with the beau- of beauty, but if I ever ended up in one I would be tempted to use the plain beau (“bo”) sound, just for mischief.

  2. Stan Says:
    October 11, 2011 at 2:22 am | Reply

    There may be a way to cross-post G+ comments on the blog posts to which they refer, but such wizardry is presently beyond me.

    Looking again at the Shirtoberfest ad, I’m a little curious about the final dot in the first line – the one after the exclamation mark. I thought it might be a tiny, smudged trademark symbol, but it doesn’t appear in an equivalent line on the website. Maybe it’s just a random dot.

  3. Pairmanteaus « Arnold Zwicky's Blog Says:
    February 16, 2012 at 9:58 am | Reply

    […] portmanteaus: cannabusiness for cannabis business (here), beautorium for beauty emporium (here). (It’s not always easy to tell whether the source of a particular portmanteau is telescoping […]

  4. -tobers « Arnold Zwicky's Blog Says:
    March 10, 2012 at 5:03 pm | Reply

    […] the portmantradition of Shirtoberfest (here) and Snow(c)tober […]

  5. Zmanteaus « Arnold Zwicky's Blog Says:
    May 6, 2012 at 8:47 pm | Reply

    […] admanteau (link) […]

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