Portmanteau Idiomatic Expressions

Today we have three more words to catch up on from previous posts, all three from August, but two from this August and one from August, 2010.

The first is whippersnapper, which I used in my blog on August 19. Whippersnapper is a portmanteau word that I always associate with an old person’s appellation of a young person. I used it hoping its use would be incongruous, since I am so young, but my burgeoning grey hair may belie that contention.

Whippersnapper actual is useful when describing “an unimportant but offensively presumptuous person, especially a young one.” It dates from the 1670s, and the Oxford English Dictionary says it is “apparently a ‘jingling extension’ of whip snapper”,  or someone who cracks whips. Etymonline.com goes further back and says it may be “an alteration of snipper-snapper,” which they say was in use in the 1590s. They also refer to a term of abuse for a woman, whipperginnie, which was in use at the same time as snipper-snapper. 

The conflation of these two phrases into whippersnapper may have been the origin, but it doesn’t help us understand either snipper-snapper or whipperginnie, or for that matter whippersnapper. So here is a conundrum. Where did it come from and what did it mean? In doing further research there are some who contend the word is a sexual reference, either to penile erection or to the use of condoms. Since the use of condoms was not widespread until the 18^th century I believe that interpretation is a recent invention.

Dickens (Nicholas Nickleby) and Alcott (Little Women) used the word whippersnapper, and Thomas Nashe used the word whipperginnie in The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), but I found nothing else to help solve the conundrum. We must bow to current usage and leave it at that.

In describing whippersnapper as a portmanteau word we encounter another of today’s words: portmanteau, which is left over from my post of August 11, 2010. Originally a portmanteau was a traveling bag, especially of the sort that would open up into two halves like a trunk. It came to English from the Middle French word portemanteau. Court officials who carried a prince’s mantle in the 1540s were called the prince’s portemanteau, porte being the imperative of porter which means to carry and manteau being the word for cloak or mantle. Mickey Mantle carried a heavy stick and hit 536 home runs for the Yankees. By the 1580s the word portmanteau came to mean a case or bag that carried clothing while traveling.

The French origins of the word give you the option of pluralizing the word by adding either an s (portmanteaus) or an x (portmanteaux). Pendants will certainly opt for the latter.

One other interesting note about the word that is necessary to explain my usage of the word above. In 1882 Lewis Carroll  coined the phrase “portmanteau word” to describe a word “blending the sound of two different words.” These are the words he used to populate the conundrum of a poem Jabberwocky, the opening of which is most familiar: “’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe…”

Today’s third word, confute, is also from the August 19, 2012 post where it was used in a definition of evince. Confute means to prove something to be false or invalid. Disprove would be a synonym. So why does confute exist and where did it come from?

It came to English in the 1520s, like portmanteau from the Middle French. The French got their word confuter from the Latin word confutare, which was formed from the intensive prefix com- and the word future, which means “to beat or strike”. It originally meant to repress, check, disprove or restrain. As such it is likely different from disprove in its intensity, not in its meaning. If you have disproved something in a forceful and substantial manner, you have confuted it. In debates, it might be the verbal “smackdown,” a portmanteau idiomatic expression.

Someone should be fined for using smackdown and portmanteau idiomatic expression in the same sentence. Young whippersnapper!http://larry-whatsthegoodword.blogspot.com/2010/08/one-word-leads-to-another.html

One Word Leads to Another...

In writing the blog for Aug. 11 I used and then discussed the word whit. In doing so another word came to mind, and I wondered about the derivation of it and its connection to whit (if any). The word is Whitsunday.

It turns out that Whitsunday comes from the Old English (where it was spelled Hwita Sunnandaeg, or White Sunday). It may have gotten its name due to the number of baptisms which would take place on this celebratory day, The new Christians would wear white robes for the baptism, hence the source of the word white. The word refers to what is more commonly known in the United States as Pentecost Sunday, which takes place seven weeks (or 50 days, which is where the pente, or five, comes into the word) after Easter. It would be a favorite time for baptism for several reasons, not the least of which that when baptisms were held outside in rivers it would be much warmer than Easter.

The other word I used in the blog and promised to get to later was portmanteau. It is a word of French derivation, coming to English in the 1580s. The context in which I used it belies its original (and still current) other meaning; I used it in describing a portmanteau word, or a word that is created by blending two other words (the word to which I was referring was anecdotage). But the use of the phrase portmanteau word was coined by Lewis Carroll (of Alice in Wonderland fame) in 1882. He was known for combining words to form new words, and in describing that proclivity in the creation of “Jabberwocky” he grabbed the word portmanteau.

Undoubtedly it was because the original meaning of portmanteau is to describe a travelling case or bag, especially the kind that hinged on the bottom and opened up to contain two sections. (The linking of two cases into one piece of luggage coordinates with the linking of two words to form one new meaning.)

Portmanteau, as mentioned earlier, comes from the Middle French (portemanteau). It is the combining (or portmanteau word) of two Middle French words: porte, which is the imperative word we could translate “carry!”, and the word for cloak or mantle, manteau. In other words, those who had sufficient power to order someone to “Carry my coat!” would say “portemanteau”. It eventually came to refer to any “court official who carried a prince’s mantle.”

Near the end of the third paragraph above I used the word proclivity. I might as well use the rest of this space to look into that word, since I still have room. Proclivity came to English in the 1590s from the Latin word proclivitatem, which meant then and means now “a tendency or propensity”. Proclivitatem comes from the Latin word for “prone to”, proclivis, which literally means “sloping.” Which might help explain the dual meaning of a synonym for proclivity: inclination.

Since there is a word pro-clivity, is there a word con-clivity? No, but there is a word declivity. It also refers to a slope, and means a downward slope. And its antonym is not proclivity but acclivity. And so on and so on...