The other day, as I was sitting at a traffic light, a big truck rolled by. It belonged to some kind of supply company.
Among the things painted on the side was “JanSan”. In context, it was easy enough to figure out; janitorial and sanitation supplies. But I started thinking about the word “Jansan”.
It’s not really a contraction–there’s no apostrophe. It’s not really an acronym; more than the first letter of each word was used. It’s not really a portmanteau; they didn’t use the whole word. (I admit I might be a bit weak on the definition of a portmanteau.)
So what is it?
There’s no absolute rule that contractions have to be written with an apostrophe, I don’t think. In any case, with made-up words, the maker-upper can make up anything he wants. And I suppose the rest of us can call it anything we want.
Spanish has two, and they aren’t written with apostrophes: del (de el), al (a el).
French has some contractions like du and au.
Hebrew has a whole lot of standard contractions, that aren’t written with anything like an apostrophe. All of the usual possessive pronouns can be contracted and attached to other words this way.
I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s a blend word unless I saw people using jansan in regular discourse. As it is, I’d call it a plain old syllable acronym in the same vein as Interpol.
I’d consider it a portmanteau. Here’s how Webster Online defines it:
“a word or morpheme whose form and meaning are derived from a blending of two or more distinct forms (as smog from smoke and fog)”
It’s a portmanteau. The classic example of a portmanteau is smog which uses only parts of the words smoke and fog. Motel from motor hotel is another portmanteau that has become a common word. These days, I usually think of a portmanteau in terms of the blending of couple names, like the infamous Brangelina or Kimye. There’s also turducken, spork, and last year’s once-in-a-lifetime holiday of Thanksgivvukah.
Another famously blent name (at least in California), although maybe not a lot of people are aware of it, is Villaraigosa (as in Antonio, recently mayor of Los Angeles). His maiden name was Villar and his wife’s maiden name was Raigosa.
The military uses these all the time (a few random examples):
AFRICOM - African Command
CENTCOM - Central Command
CINCPAC - Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Pacific Command
COCOM - combatant command
CONUS - Continental U.S.
EUCOM - European Command
FLTFORCOM - Fleet Forces Command
MARCENT - Marine Forces Central Command
NORAD - North American Aerospace Defense Command
SECDEF - Secretary of Defense
SOUTHCOM - Southern Command
TRANSCOM - Transportation Command
There’s probably some military term for these.