Given a campaign to aim a few kicks at the putative boundaries around Good English without expending too much effort in the process, a person might justly ask: why bother uniting two words whole and entire, when one can instead simply mush a few together—and so what if a bit of lexical matter gets lost in the process?** Put another way, when in 1855 Lewis Carroll wrote a line destined to become famous in ‘Jabberwocky’, ‘All mimsy were the borogoves’, what did he mean by mimsy?
Humpty Dumpty, in Through the Looking-glass, helpfully answered this very question, saying that mimsy ‘is “flimsy” and “miserable” ’. Carroll used much suggestive mixing of this kind in his nonsense writing: slythy (in the phrase ‘slythy toves’, later re-spelt slithy) mixed lithe with slimy; and chortle, which he also invented, combined chuckle and snort. Modern dictionaries call this type of coinage a ‘blend’, for obvious reasons. A century ago they were sometimes referred to as ‘contaminations’. Humpty Dumpty compared the results to a portmanteau, or double-sided suitcase, because they give ‘two meanings packed up into one word’; and for us ‘portmanteau words’ will do.
We use them all the time, but some go down quite badly. The Economist Style Guide, for example, classes guesstimate as one of its ‘horrible’ words without stopping to wonder why it was ever wanted. (It happens that as the accuracy implied by the verb to estimate declined in the second half of the eighteenth century, the phrase precise estimate became increasingly popular, and it must have been through a perceived need to stop this rot that in the early part of the twentieth century, the guesstimate slipped into the language.) A slightly older portmanteau word regularly cited to exemplify the form is smog, a blend of smoke and fog inspired by the dreadful air pollution of the late Victorian period. Going back a century further still, we find the OED accepting that it is ‘plausibly conjectured’ that flabbergast blends flabby and aghast. Nor was Lewis Carroll the first notable writer to try his hand at creating portmanteau words. In a letter of 1780, Fanny Burney described how, in response to an impertinent speech, she ‘began to feel monstrous glumpy’, mixing glum and grumpy—grumpy being a word she herself had previously launched in her novel Evelina. And sure enough, Shakespeare, too, had his own moment of fun along these lines, causing Fluellen, his Welshman in Henry V, to say, ‘His face is all bubukles’, a word that appears to blend bubo, meaning ‘abscess’, and carbuncle, meaning ‘boil’.
A wished-for portmanteau word does not always suggest itself so easily. When the combination of ever-growing ecological concerns and a recession made a virtuous necessity of holidaying at home, the word staycation seemed almost to offer itself up, and stuck. By contrast, although the bumblesome act of texting while walking—so often a means of making other pedestrians glumpy—would seem an even better spur for some sort of blended verb, attempts to push walkxting and pedexting have utterly failed; and what else fits the bill?
Naturally, in addition to glumpy and bubukle and pedexting, there have been many failed portmanteau words along the way. When the Daily Express coined sexsational in 1928, it must have had high hopes for the term as a laster; but though sexsational muddles on, it has never become mainstream. George Orwell and C. S. Lewis both used the cleverly overlapping scientifiction for what we now call sci-fi—their version perhaps doomed by awkward questions about how, when spoken, it should be stressed. The cinemaddict, listed among Paul C. Berg’s new words in 1953, never made it into the OED. And as for conglomewrite—used repeatedly by the poet Paul Muldoon to cover a subtle, marginless effect of gathered allusion—well, he can hardly have cherished great hopes of this becoming a standard term.**
Nevertheless, creating portmanteau words for in-between or liminal entities, such as smog and guesstimates, does make poetic sense. The modern term kidult reflects this impulse; so too does anticipointment: ‘The anticipointment of the prequel trilogy may have trashed the franchise’.** A feeling bitterer by far lay behind the name given in 1819 to the killing by cavalrymen of workless, starving and unrepresented people of the north at St Peter’s Field, Manchester: in a satirical gesture to the recent Battle of Waterloo, a sympathetic newspaper popularised the title by which this event has been known ever since: the ‘Peterloo Massacre’.
A grey area is not always a good place to be. And if the term infomercial feels deceitful because it fails to draw a clear line between its parts, the cosmeceutical is worse. In using this word, the makers of beauty creams and other such products hope to convey the sense that their wares will have a lasting, measurable effect; yet by not calling their products medicines, they avoid the laws that would compel them to prove that their creams actually work.
Despite the distastefully shifty uses above, many portmanteau words sound childish, or convey a feeling of silliness. Dickens, in Bleak House, was undoubtedly poking fun at wordy, expensive, ‘ceremonious’ legal fuss when he came up with wiglomeration as a mix of periwig and conglomeration. And a term like sheeple, referring to biddable herds of humans, uses its comic feel to reinforce the contempt implicit in its meaning: ‘next year you’re all going to remove your credit cards from your wallets like the pathetic unthinking sheeple you are and purchase about 749m copies’ (Guardian). The adjective glocal—global blended with local—for all the ethical thinking behind its use, will be undone in the minds of many because, simply, it sounds daft; webinars, ‘Web seminars’, will sound no better to those unused to them; and the injunction chillax tends to come inflected with irony for the same reason. Who would have imagined that ginormous, combining gigantic and enormous, originated as forces slang in the Second World War? Decades later, it still sounds babyish.
Some words get blended with others so regularly that the shortened part comes to qualify as what is called a ‘combining form’. There are classical prototypes for this manoeuvre. Electro-, for example, now forms a ‘bound element’, used in electroplate, electrostatic and electromagnetic—and in electrocute, coined in 1889 out of electro- and execute. Ambrose Bierce said hotly of electrocution, ‘To one having even an elementary knowledge of Latin grammar this word is no less than disgusting, and the thing meant by it is felt to be altogether too good for the word’s inventor’. Still, it is more usually words generated using English combining forms that inspire this kind of disdain. Some examples seem resolutely unserious: imagine a person, in a state of rapture after eating too much chocolate, claiming to have had a chocgasm after a choctastic chocathon: not only choc-, but -gasm, -tastic and -athon all now function as vaguely silly combining forms. Similarly, though the Watergate crisis brought down an American president, adding -gate to a word associated with a scandal—as in ‘Plebgate’—now serves to trivialise an act that may be deeply immoral. Simon Heffer gives the following exasperated instruction to his readers, that if they spot a new word on this pattern, ‘regard the joke as already over, and move on’. Even Oliver Kamm, author of a style guide that informs its readers that they ‘can’ write in all sorts of griper-defying ways, says foot-stampingly of -gate that it ‘doesn’t mean anything’.**
Reflect for a moment on the idea of a ginormous fantabulastic webinarathon,** and you will see how an excess of portmanteau words and jolly combining forms is calculated to make the poor griper feel ill. However, if that thought inspires you to try to dream up your own new examples, do be careful to avoid taking the sting out of them with beguiling wit. Parents may despair at the state of their teenage children’s bedrooms, but who can resist a smile on first hearing the word floordrobe? And would there even be such a thing as ‘literature’ if no writer had ever practised beditation?
While we are on the subject of mashing words together, let us pause briefly to consider two objects of special hatred in our language, the supposed non-words alright and nother. The unitary alright, a merged form of all right, has for generations been written off as dismally illiterate. (As a side point, alright as ealrihte, meaning ‘exactly’, predates all right by several hundred years, while dismal—a word no one questions—is a merged form of dies mali, ‘evil days’.) In a typical example of scorn, drawn from the work of Wilfred Whitten and Frank Whitaker, Good and Bad English: A Guide to Speaking and Writing, 1939, we find the exhortation: ‘Never—never—write “alright.” It is all wrong (not alwrong)’. They declare without explaining it that ‘the two ideas co-operate better than they unite’. And custom has not staled this line of thought. Bill Bryson explains that alright ‘ought never to appear in serious writing’. Kingsley Amis calls it a ‘one-word travesty’. Mr Heffer tells us we should avoid it ‘fervently’. In short, to those who flinch at it, alright looks as lazily shoved together as a lot does when it appears in the Telegraph as alot: ‘Fairly or unfairly, there is alot of pressure on Caicedo’s shoulders’. Yet almost everyone concedes that, given although, albeit, already, always, and so on, the compulsion to damn alright is irrational: as the OED puts it, there is ‘no cogent reason’ for making it two words, and a great deal of history to justify its being one.** What we now unworriedly give as Hallowe’en was long ago called, in a spectacularly crumpled manner, Alhallowevin. And not only did alone start out as all one, but it then, by a process known as ‘aphesis’,** lost the unstressed initial vowel to give us lone—upon which Shakespeare is credited with having formed the adjective lonely. (If only we had had no need of this one-word travesty.)** Furthermore, what about as? To quote the OED once again, this dear little word was created by the ‘progressive phonetic reduction’ of the Old English ealswa—a word that has survived separately as also, formed from the parts all and so. (Where are the purists now?) And it is not all all-words either. For instance, until the sixteenth century, there was no partaking; there was instead part taking.
You might think that with this abundance in the language of higgledy-piggledy lexical fusing, the gripers would be grateful that the form alright is so simple and clear. But that would be to misunderstand the nature of the fight. The more arbitrary their dislike of a given word, the more honour they are likely to invest in insisting that it is incorrect, and possibly not a word at all. You may feel, as a novice in the battle to misuse English on purpose, that you have enough to do already; that alright is everywhere; and that it has no need of your help. But it is not everywhere. The gripers still fight to keep it away from what they call ‘serious’ writing; and even Mr Kamm, who rules on alright that ‘it’s fine to go ahead and use it’, is too refined to do so himself. When, for example, he writes on pedants and the English language, his conclusion is that ‘they seem curiously disinterested (all right, uninterested) in it’. Fired up by this display of shilly-shallying, perhaps you will demonstrate the character required to use alright to pollute the pure waters of Good English, not accepting that its place is solely in the muddy puddles of common usage.
Nother is another premium non-word, despised but persistent, particularly identified with the phrase ‘a whole nother’. So contemptible is it taken to be, so low, that the friendly arbiters of proper usage whom we have so far met in this book do not even mention it. (What, you might justly wonder, does this tell us about the status of the hated forms they do mention?)
The phrase ‘a whole nother’ is a good example of what linguists call ‘metanalysis’ or ‘false splitting’: the word another is made from an plus other, but after a ‘false’ split, the n from an has migrated. Because ‘a whole nother’ is widely used in spoken English, it also now shows up on the page. In David Foster Wallace’s novel of 1996, Infinite Jest, a character sleeps against one wall, but wakes to find the bed ‘against a whole nother wall’.** Would a griper instead say ‘a whole other’? No. If our authorities had deigned to address themselves to this question, they would probably have proposed ‘a different X’, ‘a completely different X’, or ‘another X entirely’. But why?
After all, and as ever, there are words in English arrived at by the same means as nother that the starchiest of gripers accept, use and even enjoy. They might spurn an apron, disavow a nickname or shudder at the humble newt, but they do not object to the fact that the words apron, nickname and newt were formed by metanalysis—a newt having once been an ewt; an apron, a napron; a nickname, an eke or ‘also’ name. And what of the word umpire, another example, once noumpere, derived from the Old French nonper, meaning ‘without peer’? Does it really matter if such words drift into the language—or that they sometimes drift out again? Anyone familiar with King Lear will recall that Shakespeare had his nuncles—nuncle being a form that arose from a mis-splitting of mine uncle. Nuncle, and its pair, naunt, have not remained in widespread use. And the label nidiot has gone too—for a long time nidiot was a variant form of idiot. For a while it was even boiled down to nigit. Was that to be reviled?
Nother, it so happens, is a very old word. It can be found in Beowulf, around the year 1000, where it is used to mean ‘neither’. And in the fifteenth century, the excellent phrase neither nother arose to mean ‘neither one thing nor the other’. But the earliest citation given by the OED for the exact sense found in the expression ‘a whole nother’ dates to around 1375, appearing in a quotation where the writer exclaims: my sight is servant to my heart ‘& alle my noþer wolnk wittes’ (i.e. ‘& all my nother excellent senses’). In short, nother has been lurking about in the vocabulary of English for many hundreds of years, for most of this span meaning ‘other’. Yet what are the chances of its ever being accepted in this guise by our gripers?
They perhaps hope that the expression ‘a whole nother’ is where the rough handling of another begins and ends today. If so, this hope—like so many of their hopes—is going unanswered. Take, for example, the advertising slogan ‘Want a(nother) tattoo?’ In formal English this means ‘Would you like a tattoo, or—should you have one already—another tattoo?’ It cannot be denied that ‘a(nother)’ is deft; that translating it into formal English produces a sentence that is not deft; and that to say ‘Want a/another tattoo?’ would sound worse than either. And if that seems to be a special case, consider that other nothers out there in everyday exchanges are being shown the respect of the definite article, as in ‘The only nother minor complaint is the pitch of the motor’. Clearly nother is fighting hard for its place in the language. But that is not a reason for you to leave its fate to chance. As long as the naysayers implicitly declare, ‘While we have other, we recognise no nother’, an advanced misuser of English must stand up for this redoubtable little word.