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A portmanteau (, US ) is a word or Morpheme that fuses two or more words or word parts to give a combined or loaded meaning. A folk usage of ''portmanteau'' refers to a Word formed by combining both sounds and meanings from two or more words (e.g., '' Spork '' from '' Spoon '' and '' Fork '', '' Animatronics '' from '' Animation '' and '' Electronics '', ''ginormous'' from '' Gigantic '' and '' Enormous '', or '' Blaxploitation '' from '' Black '' and '' Exploitation ''). Typically, portmanteaux are Nonce Word s or Neologism s. Portmanteaux are commonly used in scientific literature for a wide variety of technical words, such as '' Cyborg '' from '' Cybernetic '' and '' Organism ''. ETYMOLOGY AND USAGE This usage of the word was coined by Lewis Carroll in '' Through The Looking-Glass, And What Alice Found There '' (1871). In the book, Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice words from '' Jabberwocky '', saying, “Well, ''slithy'' means ''lithe'' and ''slimy'' ... You see it's like a '''portmanteau'''—there are two meanings packed up into one word.” Carroll often used such words to humorous effect in his work. ''Portemanteau'', from Middle French ''porte'' (carry) and ''manteau'' (a coat or cover), formerly referred to a large travelling bag or suitcase with two compartments, hence the linguistic idea of fusing two words and their meanings into one. ''Portemanteau'' is rarely used to refer to a suitcase in English anymore, since that type of a suitcase has fallen into disuse. In French, the word has the different meaning of ''coat hanger'', and sometimes ''coat rack'', and is spelled ''porte-manteau''. The French word for ''Portemanteau'' is ''mot-valise'', which translates literally as ''suitcase-word''. ''Portmanteau word'' was the original phrase used to describe such words (as listed in dictionaries published as late as the early 1990s ), but this is now usually abbreviated to simply ''portmanteau''. The term ''blend'' is commonly used in modern linguistic usage for words such as '' Motel '', '' Smog '', '' Brunch ''. GENERAL SUMMARY A portmanteau morpheme is a Morpheme which fuses two or more grammatical categories (see Fusional Language ). The classical example of such a morpheme in English is the verbal suffix ''-s''. This particular suffix carries (i.e., ports) at least four distinct inflectional meanings and imparts each of these onto the verb's meaning: Spanish verb suffixes are also fusional, with very many portmanteaux in the Spanish inflectional system. A portmanteau word is a word which fuses two function words. This use overlaps a bit with the folk term Contraction , but linguists tend to avoid using the latter. Example: In French, ''à'' + ''les'' becomes ''aux'' (), a single indivisible word which contains both meanings. Outside the formal study of linguistics, the term portmanteau is used in a different, yet still not clearly defined sense, to refer to a blending of the parts of two or more words (generally the first part of one word and the ending of a second word) to combine their meanings into a single Neologism . One of the more famous portmanteaux in Postmodern Continental Philosophy is '' Différance ''. Coined by Jacques Derrida , ''différance'' is a word combining the terms to ''differ'' and to ''defer'' (in the Saussurean sense) to describe the fractured and eternally- Signifying character of language (see Deconstruction ). SEE ALSO
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