Arnold Zwicky's Blog

On the mastodon.social page , a posting by @Aleums of a scheme for generating a whole family of portmanteaus from a base set of five emotion adjectives:

(Ultimate source not identified.)

The base set, going clockwise:

stressed, horny, angry, sad, hungry

1st order set, the portmanteaus of adjacent items (clockwise again, starting from stressed):

strorny, horngry, sangry, sungry, strungry

(so strorny is stressed + horny)

2nd order set, portmanteauing items two apart (going clockwise, starting from stressed):

strangry, sorny, hangry, strad, hurngry

(so strangry is stressed + angry)

And 3rd order set, from a base item + the portmanteau of its two adjacent items (clockwise, starting from stressed):

strurngry, strorngry, horngrad, hungerad, strungrad

(so strurngry is stressed + hungry + horny)

Some of the portmanteaus aren’t simple splicings of the first part of one contributor with the second part of the other (as in stressed + horny giving str-orny), but interleave the parts of the two contributors: hungry + horny giving hurngry (where the two contributors share initial h, medial n, and final y).

This entry was posted on August 28, 2018 at 5:28 pm and is filed under Morphology, 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.