Lingthusiasm Episode 92: Brunch, gonna, and fozzle - The smooshing episode
Sometimes two words are smooshed together in a single act of creativity to fill a lexical gap, like making "brunch" from breakfast+lunch. Other times, words are smooshed together gradually, over a long period of speakers or signers discovering more efficient ways to position their mouth or hands, such as pronouncing "handbag" being pronounced more like "hambag".
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about smooshing words together. We talk about the history of portmanteau words like motel and chortle, the poem Jabberwocky, and why some portmanteaus, like Kenergy from Ken + energy, sound really satisfying, while others (wonut??) just don't catch on at all. We also talk about words becoming more efficient to produce over time, like how a path can be gradually created through many people choosing the same route through a field, such as "going to" becoming "gonna" or the historical forms of ASL "remember" and French "aujourd'hui".
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.
Announcements:
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about secret codes and the word games we create based on them!! We talk about using alternate symbols to encode messages like in semaphore, Morse code, as well as repurposing existing symbols like the Caesar cipher, ROT13, and cryptoquote puzzles. We also talk about cryptic crosswords, which aren't technically a kind of cryptography but were used to recruit codebreakers for Bletchley Park in World War II, as well as Navajo, Choctaw, and other Native American code talkers who used their language skills to transmit messages in both world wars that were much harder to crack than a mere cipher.
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Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
Lingthusiasm episode 'When Nothing means Something'
Wikipedia list of portmanteaus
OED entry for 'frenemy'
Examples of Spanish portmanteaus - post by Reddit post by user ExtraSquats4dathots
More examples of Spanish portmanteaus
Wikipedia entry for 'Blend Words'
'BroT3' - post by All Things Linguistic
'Quantifying cronuts: Predicting the quality of blends', by Constantine Lignos and Hilary Prichard
'Frankenwords: they're alive! But for how long?' by Andy Bodle
'#portmantfail' - post by Superlinguo
'The Fandom Pairing Name: Blends and the Phonology-Orthography Interface' post by All Things Linguistic
'The Fandom Pairing Name: Blends and the Phonology-Orthography Interface' paper by Cara M. DiGirolamo
Wikipedia entry for 'Jabberwocky'
'An Open Letter To The Red Squiggles Under “Imput”' post by All Things Linguistic
'Homorganic Nasal Assimilation in Arsi-Bale Afan Oromo: A Non-Linear Phonology' by Tilahun Negash
'Nasal assimilation in Jakarta Indonesian' by Ferdinan Okki Kurniawan
'Nasalisation and nasal assimilation in Akan' by John Odoom and Kwasi Adomako
Lingthusiasm episode 'What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are'
Assimilation processes in sign language
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Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
