A portmant is a clipped portmanteau. There aren’t all that many of them, but here’s one that came to my attention today. It starts with the portmanteau zoobiquity, a somewhat over-clever (and opaque, but certainly memorable) combination of zoo + ubiquity. And goes on to zoob.
Zoobiquity is the title of a 2012 book by Barbara Natterson-Horowitz & Kathryn Bowers (website here) — subtitled “The astonishing connection between humans and animal health” — and a reference to an assortment of enterprises springing from the book, referred to on the website by the clipping zoob: “zoob facts to ponder” (dogs faint, that is, suffer vasovagal syncopes), “zoob news”, etc.
From the website, about the book:
We may think our problems are uniquely human. But animals and humans get the same diseases. How might we better understand human health and illness if we harnessed knowledge from veterinarians, the doctors that take care of other animals? Zoobiquity explores how jaguar breast cancer, dolphin diabetes, flamingo heart attacks, canine PTSD — and more — are transforming human medicine.
April 26, 2013 at 9:39 pm |
I was just hearing about this on a podcast today and found what Dr Natterson-Horowitz was talking about very interesting, but the term zoobiquity pretty much opaque even though the two components are clear. It’s only now that I understand that it seemsm to know something like “animal stuff [in this case, pathologies] are everywhere [in this case, among humans]”.
April 27, 2013 at 6:13 am |
Two comments from Ghil’ad Zuckerman on Facebook: