The word of the week is...
This is in honour of Ursula K Le Guin who very sadly passed away this week. A central part of Le Guin’s novel ‘The Dispossessed’, this is a form of anarchism which is very complicated and far too difficult for me to give a full explanation of here because as per usual I’m very late doing this and I don’t have time to type it all (have a look at Wikipedia which explains it much better than I can).
Please come back next time, I promise it’ll be better.
As well as being a type of bag, a portmanteau is also a word made up of two other words, like ‘smog’ (smoke and fog) or ‘breathalyser’ (breath and analyser). It was Lewis Carroll who first used ‘portmanteau’ in this way. Here’s Humpty Dumpty in ‘Through the Looking Glass’:
‘Well, “slithy” means “lithe and slimy” ... You see it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word.’
Modern slang continues to embrace the portmanteau with words like ‘chillax’, ‘bromance’ and, a personal favourite, ‘craptacular’ (something that’s so crap it’s also spectacular).
Weirdly, and rather pleasingly (at least if you’re a wordy geek like me – maybe not so much if you’re a normal person), ‘portmanteau’ itself is a portmanteau. It's made up of ‘porter’, French for ‘to carry’ and ‘manteau’, also French for cloak. MIND. BLOWN.
This was inspired by a documentary I’ve just watched on BBC 4 about the song ‘Fairytale of New York’ by the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl (well worth a look if you have the time).
In British slang scumbag just means a horrible person. But in US slang it means condom. Yep. It comes from ‘scum’ which is US slang for ‘semen’ and ‘bag’ which means, well, ‘bag’. So, there you go.
Happy Christmas.
These days we use this to mean ‘little’ (as in ‘Who’s an ickle pickle?’ which I regularly ask my dog. Answer: it’s her). But it actually means ‘a frozen drop of water’. Which is where ‘icicle’ came from.
* Shamelessly stolen from Susie Dent’s Twitter feed. Except the bit about my dog. Susie Dent doesn't ask my dog if she’s an ickle pickle.
