Fifty or so years ago, it was the Age of the Acronym. New acronyms were everywhere in massive quantities. Some people still found them unusual. OK, acronyms are still happening, and we don’t even think twice about them. They’re routine, common, everyday things. We coin them on the fly and no one notices.
These days, all the cool coinages are portmanteaus. In the Google News headlines today I saw two I hadn’t encountered before: coronasomnia and twindemic. How long is it going to be before that’s also routine? I suspect it’s not long. For some people it may already be here.
I feel like it got super popular when “Brangelina” became a thing. After that, other couples had their names smashed together by the media because it was funny, then it wasn’t funny and it was just what you did and it carried over into other parts of our lives.
Community did this a lot as well. Compulsault, explainabrag, copera, just about every thing Chang or the dean said (though I’m not sure if those count).
Portmanteaus themselves are not new at all. Lewis Carroll coined the term for them in Through the Looking-glass, which was published in 1871. But he didn’t come up with the concept, There’s a few that pre-date him by quite a while. They’re just more and more common these days. And yeah, maybe the modern trend started with portmanteauing celebrity couples, which was when, early '00s? Somewhere around there. But I’m old enough to remember when it wasn’t very common to create them.
The early Time magazine had a mania for bizarre portmanteau words. Probably lasted a couple of decades from its start in the 1920s until after WWII. Cinemactor and cinemactress were used regularly, but so were Broadwayfarer and eccentrician.
Other magazines copied them at times, so the pre-WWII era is a peak in the portmanteau timeline.
I find them challenging, in a good way. They’re a puzzle. Corona + somnia is…? You can’t sleep because you’re worried about the pandemic? Twindemic? Hmm. Spike in twin births? IDK.
About 20 years ago the Atlantic had a “Word Watch” column. Not all were portmanteaux
For example Robert Greene used in 1592 in his book The Defence of Conny Catching the word foolosophy which is a blending from foolish and philosophy. In the seventeenth century Samuel Purchas mentioned the word knavigation, a knavish navigation (Pilgrimage, 1613).