A Large Traveling Bag, Typically Leather – Portmanteau

A portmanteau is also a term for the mashup of two words to make another. Sometimes humorous, sometimes just useful. For example, breakfast + lunch = brunch.

Portmanteau word is a term coined by Lewis Carrol — thanks so much, Humpty Dumpty and other of you crazy characters. “Slithy” anyone?

English is prone to portmanteau words, because it’s a language that seemingly likes to evolve. And no one is trying to keep English “pure” by keeping out foreign words. That ship sailed ages ago and, like the best of surrenders, we’ve developed a mentality of “if you can’t beat them, join them” when it comes to our words.

Get it, join them? Portmanteau? Ah, sorry, you see the mindset I am in today. I’m feeling rather punny.

Well, anyway, there are lots of examples of portmanteau words. And modern slang is extremely fond of creating new portmanteaus. Or portmanteaux. Both are plural forms…

Anyway, on with the poem. This is one of those poems that’s just for fun. And as we head into a New Year, a little light-hearted humor can’t go wrong. This is also a strongly paced, rhyming poem. I hardly ever rhyme except to draw attention to words. This is a perfect poem for drawing attention with rhyme, because the words are the stars in their own right.

Portmanteau

 – a large traveling bag of stiff leather

The smart phone’s not a smone,
and the prose poem’s not a proem.
But the web log is a blog,
and smog is smoke and fog.
Plus volcanic smog is vog!
Turducken’s quite the toast
when threepeating a roast,
and bridezilla’s a scary bride.
All portmanteau aside,
when you wake on the wrong side,
you start your day out hangry.
And if the sun is glittering bright
it’s not a spangly sight,
because a spangle’s a buckle only,
not a sparkly bangle. Sadly.

If you enjoyed Portmanteau

Spangle comes from the Old Dutch word for buckle, so it isn’t a general term for shiny, sparkly objects. And certainly not a term for a sparkly bracelet. But we tend to use the term spangle to mean a generic shiny object, because it sounds like it ought to mean that. Which is probably a bit more than you wanted to know about spangles.

You’ll find more of my poems on this blog or in the collection Stars Crawl Out From Their Caves, which is available in both ebook and print.  Missed a poem of the week? Links to prior weeks are on this page.

This ends 52 poem-of-the-week blog posts. Can you believe it? I can hardly believe it myself, and I was on the writing end. Let me know if you’d like to see this series continue.

Some of you who read this blog regularly (you know who you are, even if I don’t) probably wouldn’t have guessed that you would read 52 poems in any year, let alone 2018 when you were busy with lots of other things in this world that keeps moving faster and faster all the time. Which brings us back to Lewis Carroll.

you must run as fast as you can just to stay in place, and to get ahead, you have to run even faster

–the gist of what Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen said to Alice,
because I didn’t look up the exact quote

Thank you so much for your kind attention to my work from week to week.

Comments welcome below.

Happy New Year!