Word Play: Portmanteau Word – Mornternoon

Word Play is an occasional feature on the BesenArts news blog exploring clever figures of speech, literary devices, etc. Our first entry comes courtesy of Ira Lehn of the Friends of Chamber Music in Stockton, California.

Portmanteau Word: A literary device in which two (or more) words are blended into one. The term was invented by Lewis Carroll, and used with devastating cleverness in his Alice books. Think “chortle,” as in “chuckle” and “snort,” introduced in “Through the Looking Glass.”

Today’s example is “mornternoon,” which appeared in an e-mail I received yesterday from Ira Lehn of the Friends of Chamber Music in Stockton, California. His e-mail began, “Good mortnernoon Robert.” In a subsequent e-mail, he wrote, “I began my note to you and I got to ‘mor’ and realized it was not morning where you are, so I finished it off to take care of both East and West.”

I think Ira’s usage is not so much Lewis Carroll as James Joyce. A personal favorite from Finnegans Wake is “sinduced” from “sinned” and “seduced,” but this should not be taken as indicative of anything about my good friend Ira. Either way, unquestionably brilliant.

The Alexander String Quartet will lead off the 2014-2015 season for the Friends on September 21, playing Mozart’s K. 590, Kodály’s Quartet No. 2, and Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 2. The Horszowski Trio will perform for the series on November 16 – Beethoven’s “Ghost,” Joan Tower’s “For Daniel,” and Schumann’s Trio No. 2.

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