Portmanteau

The use of tags to describe objects on the web will propagate the creation of new words which imply bigger ideas much more succinctly.

Most of these new words will likely be portmanteaux. A portmanteau is a new word which combines the spelling and meaning of two or more words. For example, a spork is a spoon / fork hybrid. Additionally, 'portmanteau' is one of those few words that you can make plural by adding an 'x'.

Hotlanta (hot, Atlanta) is a local favorite.

I seem to tend to use fidiot fairly often when I'm driving in traffic.

The web is already packed with portmanteaux. For example, consider email, emoticon, and, in fact, the word internet itself is derived from international and network.

The Wiktionary has an entire list of useful portmanteaux for your tagging needs.

In this day and age, there is no such thing as too much. So, I have endeavored to create a few of my own.

Blogophytes (blog, neophyte) can't wait to pump up their blego (blog, ego) a little with a successful post on digg.

Note: Don't confuse blego with the portmanteau homograph blego (blog, Lego) which means a blog built out of lots of smaller blogs.

Consider this sentence: I can't believe Ray would work on his blucky (blog, sucky) instead of billing some hours.

EggBlog (Egg Nog, blog) - a blog that is only updated once a year during the holidays.

TroggBlog (The Troggs, blog) - A blog that covers the same 3-chord topics as every other blog on the web. (Not that that is bad. After all, Jimi Hendrix covered Wild Thing.)

Hey! Blog (web, log) is a portmanteau, too.

Here's some more examples:

Parison (Paris, prison) - very topical

rubyatric (Ruby, geriatric) - an aging developer who reads Ruby books just to seem relevant still.

self-developrecating (self deprecating, developer) - a developer who adds methods to the API and then deprecates them in the next release, just for laughs. (See: Research In Motion Device Java Library)

Moonvertising (Moon, advertising) - probably costs more than Adsense.

Moovertising (Moo, advertising) - an idea waiting for someone to jump on it.

sneasel (snot, weasel) - one that I like to use with my kid. That's either a boogle, gang, confusion, or pack of sneasels for you animal-collectiverati out there.

While I did think most all these up myself, I couldn't necessarily take credit for them. Some are just portmantobvious (portmanteau, obvious).

As a final note, the Wikipedia states, "Typically, portmanteau words are neologisms." (070511) What are neologisms? It's a word, term, or phrase which has been recently created.

Once again, to quote from Wikipedia:

"In psychiatry, [neologism] is used to describe the creation of words which only have meaning to the person who uses them. It is considered normal in children, but a symptom of thought disorder indicative of a psychotic mental illness such as schizophrenia in adults. Usage of neologisms may also be related to aphasia acquired after brain damage resulting from a stroke or head injury." (070511)

That being said, what is your favorite portmanteau?