Grab Bag for Word Nerds, Part One: Portmanteaus: Vocab Mash-Ups

In some ways, blogs feel as old as cave paintings, but this is still a newish word that was first spotted in 1999. Combining web and log, blog became a trendy word for your uncle’s online diary of Grateful Dead concerts or your grandmother’s internet reviews of antique swords. Or whatever grandmothers are into. Twitter, which has become much more popular since the early days of blogs, is a microblog. Maybe someday communication will get even more concise and we’ll get nanoblogs.

This is one of many fanciful coinages of author Lewis Carroll, first appearing in a neologism-filled passage from 1871’s Through the Looking Glass. It's easy to see the similarity to chuckle and snort, but whether or not Carroll sewed those words together, he came up with the perfect word for a short, nasal laugh — often a laugh you’re trying to stifle.

If you’re a fan of science fiction, you’re probably familiar with cyborgs: part-human, part-mechanical folks. The ingredients of this term, which has been around since 1960, are cybernetic and organism. While cyborgs are often seen wreaking havoc (or saving the day) in sci-fi, technically, some people are cyborgs, since many of us are enhanced by technology, from pacemakers to hearing aids to artificial legs. In the future, we might all be cyborgs, and it could be a good thing.

Dumbfound is dumb plus confound minus con, and the meaning is similar to confound. When you’re confounded or dumbfounded, you can’t figure out what’s going on. When you dumbfound someone, you befuddle them. Being dumbfounded is a lot more than being confused. A dumbfounding turn of events makes your head spin and boggles your mind.

When something happens in a certain circumstance for no discernible reason — perhaps by luck, good, bad, or dumb—you can call it a happenstance. It’s a solid alternative to coincidence. Besides being a noun, happenstance does double duty as an adjective. When something happens by chance, you can describe it as happenstance.

Like the origin of so many words, the birth of meld isn’t definitive. But a pretty good guess is that it’s a mix of melt and weld, two other words that suggest things being broken down and put together in a new way. Lots of stuff can be melded: two companies merging, two folks marrying, or two dog breeding, à la the puggle (a mix of pug and beagle).

Smoggy is the adjective form of smog, a classic word blend and pretty much perfect word, combining smoke and fog, just like how smoke and fog combine, regrettably for our lungs, to create smog. Smog has been found in English since at least 1905.