Some literary techniques are easy to abuse. I hate to admit that the portmanteau is one of these (thanks, Snickers). While still one of my favorite all-time ways to get bizzy with words, portmanteauing has become a central facet of our experience as consumers and internet-era digesters of signs. We are asked to constantly hybridize language. We are verbal garbage disposals.

We cannot escape this technique, and so its art becomes mundane craft; its essence as witty relief from the normal is distilled into punnery. We are, we feel, ultimately the victims of portmanterrorism:

Would it make a difference to say we suffered
from affluenza in those days? Could we blame
Reaganomics, advertainment, the turducken
and televangelism we swallowed by the sporkful,
all that brunch and Jazzercise, Frappuccinos
we guzzled on the Seatac tarmac, sexcellent
celebutantes we ogled with camcorders while
our imagineers simulcast the administrivia
of our alarmaggedon across the glocal village?

—”Portmanterrorism,” Nick Lantz,
from The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors’ House, 2010.

Lantz’s poem goes on and is as nigh-unreadable as it is spot-on. Props to Junio for bringing this dopeness to my attention

In other news, this site offers a very simple guide to literary wildlife such as the portmanteau. Just text, no shenanigans.