Personally, I’ve always felt that “portmanteau” should be a type of hat. Like this one. That’s a portmanteau hat, if I ever saw one.
Will Ferrell says “that’s ginormous” in Elf. It always snaps me out of the movie. It doesn’t seem like a word he’d use.
If he couldn’t even come up with hulf as a hybrid word for “human and elf”, what’s he doing saying “ginormous”?
Strangely I hear (and use) a similar form, but it would never be ‘a fuck off huge tractor’ just ‘a fuck off tractor’ where the intensifier indicates that the tractor is both large and impressive. It comes from the calling Doc Martins ‘Fuck off boots’. Anything is ‘fuck off’ if it is or can be likened to agressive. So a studded lether biker jacket would be a fuck off jacket, a Harley would be a fuck off bike, etc.
But something being ‘fuck off tall’ is as strange to me as saying something is ‘large tall’.
A “gyromouse” is a small rodent stowaway on a spaceship that coincidentally helps determine the ship’s position in space.
How? Lots of spinning.
I wish I had more opportunities to use the adjective “gynandrous” (caution - sexually explicit photo).
Why is a mouse when it spins?
That’s a sexually ambiguous dead language portmanteau, to be sure.
Because it’s not when it doesn’t, of course.
I just ran across the word “celebutante”.
I hereby request that this abomination be placed in a portmanteau and ignited.
“Bittyscule” is just adorable, Seven!
But I’m with aclubs on “ginormous.” It is a hideous train wreck of a word, fit only for teenyboppers and the culturally impoverished. So Merriam Webster says it’s not contemporaneous with the “Britney” generation, eh? Bunkum! They just lost a lot of credibility in my eyes. Let me drag out the old OED and I’ll tell you what a REAL dictionary has to say on the matter…
Oh. 1948. WWII military slang. Well, so much for my ear.
I still hate it.
I must admit that I’m entertained by both “ridonkulous” and “catastrofuck”, but of which seem to be the same type of construction.
I’ve got a friend who uses the term, “recockulous.”