We've all heard the media refer to Bennifer -- the doomed pairing of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. Or to Scientology sweeties TomKat -- Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. Or how about Brangelina -- insanely beautful beings Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Daytime dramas seem to have adopted this name game for each of their most popular couplings. For example, Lumi combines Days of our Lives' supercouple Lucas Roberts and Sami Brady. Nuke refers to As the World Turns' kissyface boys Noah Mayer and Luke Snyder. Even the nighttime sitcom, The Office, spawned a couple couples with smushed-together monikers -- Jam for Jim and Pam, and Dwangela for Dwight and Angela.
What I'd really like to know is exactly when this became such an obsession, this morphing two into one, the vowel-and-consonant version of a liplock.
In a quest to find out, I discovered the phenomenon has a name and has been occurring at least as far back as Lewis Carroll's Through The Looking-Glass -- mid to late 1800s. Carroll used the word "portmanteau" to describe the fusing of two or more words or word parts to make a combined or alternate (and sometimes ironic) meaning.
I also discovered the word has a wikipedia entry. (Let's face it, what doesn't? Ok...I don't. I checked.) And the entry has such examples as:
* Bionic, from biological and electronic
* Breathalyzer, from breath analyzer
* Brunch, from breakfast and lunch
* Camcorder, from camera and recorder
* Chunnel, from Channel Tunnel
* Email, from electronic mail
* Emoticon, from emotion icon
* Infomercial, from informational commercial
* Interpol, from International Police
* Simulcast, from simultaneous broadcast
* Sitcom, from situational comedy
* Spork, from spoon and fork
So I had to do it. I combined my beloved's name with my own. We're not exactly Entertainment Tonight material, or even National Enquirer. We're Timy. Or maybe Aim.
Shoot me now.
What I'd really like to know is exactly when this became such an obsession, this morphing two into one, the vowel-and-consonant version of a liplock.
In a quest to find out, I discovered the phenomenon has a name and has been occurring at least as far back as Lewis Carroll's Through The Looking-Glass -- mid to late 1800s. Carroll used the word "portmanteau" to describe the fusing of two or more words or word parts to make a combined or alternate (and sometimes ironic) meaning.
I also discovered the word has a wikipedia entry. (Let's face it, what doesn't? Ok...I don't. I checked.) And the entry has such examples as:
* Bionic, from biological and electronic
* Breathalyzer, from breath analyzer
* Brunch, from breakfast and lunch
* Camcorder, from camera and recorder
* Chunnel, from Channel Tunnel
* Email, from electronic mail
* Emoticon, from emotion icon
* Infomercial, from informational commercial
* Interpol, from International Police
* Simulcast, from simultaneous broadcast
* Sitcom, from situational comedy
* Spork, from spoon and fork
So I had to do it. I combined my beloved's name with my own. We're not exactly Entertainment Tonight material, or even National Enquirer. We're Timy. Or maybe Aim.
Shoot me now.
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