Two bulletins in the portmanteau news: portmanteau holiday names for combinations of holidays (especially in the December holiday season); portmanteau restaurant names for types of restaurants with something extra added. For example: the holimanteau Chrismukkah, the restaumanteau breastaurant.
Holimanteaus. My inspiration here comes from yesterday’s replay of a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon in which Calvin devises the snowy holiday of Chris(t)moween, but without putting a name to it:
(#1) Christmas (secular Christmas, conceived of as a midwinter celebration) — and Halloween combined: unholy snowmen
But surely the most famous holiday combo — there are others — is Chrismukkah. From Wikipedia:
(#2) A Chrismukkah card from The O.C.‘s familyChrismukkah is a pop-culture portmanteau neologism referring to the merging of the holidays of Christianity’s Christmas and Judaism’s Hanukkah. The term was popularized beginning in December 2003 by the TV drama The O.C., wherein character Seth Cohen creates the holiday to signify his upbringing in an interfaith household with a Jewish father and Protestant mother (although the holiday can also be adopted by all-Jewish households who celebrate Christmas as a secular holiday). Chrismukkah is also celebrated as an ironic, alternative holiday, much like the Seinfeld-derived “Festivus”. [My 12/21/18 posting “22-festoon!” has a section on Festivus.]
… Before “Chrismukkah” entered the popular lexicon in the early 21st century, Christmas and Hanukkah celebrations had been informally merged with one another. A Christmas celebration with a tree, songs, and gifts became a symbol of being a part of German culture for many middle-class Jewish families in the 19th century. Some Jews celebrated Christmas as a secular “festival of the world around us” without religious meaning, or they transferred Christmas customs to the Hanukkah festival. In the 1990s, the popular sitcom Friends often portrayed Jewish characters Ross and Monica celebrating Christmas with their Christian friends, signifying many contemporary American Jewish households who celebrate Christmas in the strictly secular sense [perhaps with a star on a Christmas tree, but without a nativity scene, and certainly without reading passages from the books of Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2 in the Christian bible.].
On the tv show, from Wikipedia:
The O.C. is an American teen drama television series created by Josh Schwartz that originally aired on the Fox network in the United States from August 5, 2003, to February 22, 2007, running a total of four seasons. “O.C.” is an abbreviation of Orange County, the location in California in which the series is set.
The series centers on Ryan Atwood, a troubled but gifted young man from a broken home who is adopted by the wealthy and philanthropic Sandy and Kirsten Cohen. Ryan and his foster brother Seth, a socially awkward yet quick-witted teenager, deal with life as outsiders in the high-class world of Newport Beach.
(On The O.C., Seth pronounces the name of his holiday as
/ˈkrɪsmǝˌkʌ/ or /ˈkrɪsmǝkǝ/ )
Do you want a portmanteau with that? Foodmanteaus have been all the rage for some time. Some discussion in my 6/10/13 posting “Foodmanteaus” (on cronuts, tofurkey, and more), and then in other postings following it.
Then there are eating establishments of various kinds, many of which do more than just provide things to eat or drink; they sell things or provide entertainment or whatever. And then a hybrid referent sometimes cries out for a portmanteau name.
On the 21st, Victor Steinbok reported on ADS-L on two restaumanteaus he had recently come across, one in British GQ (the men’s fashion magazine), one on the CNN news site.
clubstaurant, from British GQ, in “Inside the raucous, ridiculous rise of the clubstaurant” by Kathleen Johnston on 9/6/19:
[Bagatelle, in Central London,] wasn’t the first to marry the traditional restaurant experience with a club or party atmosphere (let’s call it a “clubstaurant”), but the concept has certainly refined what steak joint STK started over ten years ago, also in Manhattan (essentially sticking a DJ into a slick restaurant-meets-lounge). Fast-forward to 2019 and a new wave of restaurants providing all-out extravaganzas has hit the capital.
… Clubstaurants are simply the loudest, brashest realisation of a wider movement towards what the industry is calling “performative dining”.
grocerant, from CNN, in “The rise of ‘grocerants’: Grocery stores that cook you dinner” by Nathaniel Meyersohn on 12/20/19:
For decades, grocery stores have included hot food and salad bars, delis and sandwich stations. But in recent years, many grocers have started adding sit-down restaurants, food halls and craft beer on tap, giving rise to the term “grocerants.”
“The grocerant game is something that almost every retailer with larger stores should be playing,” said Diana Sheehan, vice president at marketing research firm Incontext Solutions. “Restaurants have become one of the most successful ways for retailers to stand apart.”
On the 22nd, Nancy Friedman added an older coinage:
Hooters and its ilk have been known as “breastaurants” for a couple of decades.
citing the Wikipedia page on the subject:
A breastaurant is a restaurant that has skimpily-dressed female waiting staff. The term “breastaurant” dates from the early 1990s, around the time that the restaurant chain Hooters became popular in the United States. It has since been applied to other restaurants that offer similar services, such as Redneck Heaven, Tilted Kilt Pub & Eatery, Twin Peaks, Bombshells, Bone Daddy’s, Ojos Locos [‘Crazy Eyes’], Chula’s [chula ‘hot woman, hottie’], Bikinis Sports Bar & Grill, Racks, Show-Me’s, Mugs & Jugs, and The WingHouse Bar & Grill.
The restaurants often have a sexual double-entendre brand name and also offer specific themes, both in decoration and menu. The restaurants offer numerous perks for customers, including alcohol and flirty servers.
… Restaurants staffed by males, with a similar focus on server appearance include Tallywackers [tallywhacker, antique slang for ‘penis, dick’], featuring scantily clad men, which opened in Dallas, Texas, in May 2015 and closed in August 2016. In Japan, there are establishments such as Macho Cafe and Macho Meat Shop, where brawny men serve food and drinks…
As Larry Horn then noted:
luckily for Hooters, the trademark for the term — highly valued as I’m sure it was — has fallen victim to genericide:
In October 2012, Bikinis Sports Bar & Grill successfully registered the term “breastaurant” as a trademark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office; as of May 24, 2019 the term was no longer trademarked under the rule of section 8, “Continued use not filed within Grace Period”. Bikinis Sports Bar & Grill had closed its last restaurant on December 23, 2018, 6 months prior. (from the Wikipedia entry)
So now Hooters, Twin Peaks, Mugs & Jugs, and all the rest can call themselves breastaurants.
December 28, 2019 at 4:19 pm |
Many years before the turn of the millennium, I remember “Chrisukkah” (no “m”) being in somewhat broad use, certainly not a hapax.
December 28, 2019 at 5:29 pm |
Remember Thanksgivukkah, November 28th, 2013? Thanksgiving fell on the latest date it can fall on, and Hanukkah began on November 28th, which it won’t do again for many thousands of years. (Because the Hebrew calendar assumes a Julian solar year, it precesses toward later dates for festivals.)