meau tender (the account formerly known as hector sperra)

@sperra

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actor/improviser, writer & essayist, urban planner, computer scientist, amateur media scholar, Chicago lover, tupperware container for multitudes, #1 fleabag fan

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meau tender (the account formerly known as hector sperra)@sperra9/29/2023, 3:06 AM

ok linguists:

i've been wondering lately: Is there a term that describes words which are portmanteaus, but where one of the conjoined sub-words doesn't contribute its meaning to the definition of the portmanteau?

i'm thinking here about portmanteaus like "cheesecel" that might get used in a very zoomerish way to mean, "someone who is really into eating cheese" (and obviously not, someone who is celibate regarding cheese). i've always assumed these are playful perversions of the word "incel" (interesting because that word is, itself, a portmanteau: "involuntarily celibate"), but maybe the -cel part is coming from somewhere else i don't know about?

___-gate and ___-core portmanteaus (e.g. "gamergate," "cottagecore") are pretty close to this phenomenon, too. i think in those cases you can at least make a tenuous connection to the definition of both sub-words (e.g., "gamergate is the Watergate of the gaming community" or "cottagecore fans are hardcore about cottage aesthetics"), but they feel a bit more removed to me, possibly because we use them so frequently. ___-pilled also feels like another close example, but maybe not a 100% fit.

what's going on here? any thoughts or existing research on this? are there other examples you can think of?

#linguistics #me? i'm a totally cheesepilled cheesecore cheesecel #*this is the sound of me stuffing my mouth with cheese*

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in reply to @sperra's post:

Robot Face @robotface9/29/2023, 3:24 AM

I'd interpret "cheesecel" to mean someone who is celibate, favoring cheese over sex

meau tender (the account formerly known as hector sperra)@sperra9/29/2023, 11:55 AM

oh shit that makes so much more sense

ghost of cohosts past @folly10/6/2023, 12:50 PM

I think often, if not always, the second noun goes through a reduction of meaning to just "[nountype] that is bad or can/should be scorned". (qua)-gate being "event regarding (qua) which is bad or can/should be scorned"? I'm thinking of the old channer epithet of "(qua)-fag", to mean "person of (qua) type or interest who can/should be scorned", to wit even "normalfag" as a term for "person of any sexuality who is not Online"(derogatory)? Which is what I'd expect cheesecel to mean in this context, though never encountering it before (and not being forced to interact with reddit-based language derivations in this cohost era), I'd be willing to believe it could have specificity beyond "person we scorn, who likes cheese".

Altogether I'd maybe call it an "epithetmanteau", perhaps? Despite four syllables, I think it's reasonably apt; or at least, full of pith.

meau tender (the account formerly known as hector sperra)@sperra10/6/2023, 1:43 PM

epithetmanteau, i like that! or maybe just epithetteau, to really lean into the one-syllable endings :)

i totally agree with your case here of the usual implications of scorn— and i think maybe that's why new uses of stuff like ___-cel and ___-pilled are kind of delightful to me, because i most often see them deployed playfully and self-referentially/self-deprecatingly rather than as a marker against someone else! always fun when language does that, imo.