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Strobbery (n.)

“Put your hands in the air - this is a strobbery”

A cute little comic I saw had this caption accompanying a drawing of a strawberry in a little robber’s mask with a little gun and little stolen money bag. This pun is a portmanteau of strawberry and robbery; together they create a word meaning, quite obviously, “a robbery performed by a strawberry.”

#fruit #crime

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Turkey-skinator (n.)

On Facebook, I came across a cake decorating video in which a woman created a cake made too resemble a thanksgiving turkey. At one point, she uses a rubber drawer liner, which she names the turkey-skinator, in order to texture fondant to look like turkey skin, as the name suggests. This word formation takes the compound noun turkey skin and adds the humorous suffix -inator to create a word meaning “machine that makes something appear to be turkey skin.”

#turkey #cake #football #fall #autumn

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Iambulance (n.)

“An iambulance goes ‘wee WOO wee WOO wee WOO wee WOO’”

I saw this on yet another linguistics meme page post on Facebook. Besides being a fantastic pun, this word is a portmanteau of iamb or iambic and ambulance. Its meaning appears to be nothing more than an ambulance whose alarm goes off in iambs.

#wee woo wee woo

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Uncompleteness (n.) Uncompleted (adj.)

“I think that one of the best ways for us to work as human beings is not only to know that we are uncompleted beings but to assume the uncompleteness.”

This quote by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire included the words uncompleted and uncompleteness, both of which are unusual, but easily understood. They are unusual because we are accustomed to seeing the forms incomplete and incompleteness, respectively. While both words are interesting because of their use of the prefix un-, a different allomorph of the negation prefix from the in- usually found before the word complete. The fact that uncompleted also includes the -ed suffix to indicate an adjective, whereas the common adjective form incomplete does not. 

#paulo freire #education #school #again

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Fratless (adj.)

“We are a fratless school now, baby!”

Upon the recent dissolution of both of Swat’s fraternity, I found myself using this word to describe the new condition of our campus: fratless. A simple word construction, the noun frat with the suffix -less to form the adjective meaning “devoid of fraternities.”

#greek life #school #wILD

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Pregnot (adj.)

“You're not pregnant, you're pregnot”

This word arose in response to my friend asking if she looked pregnant in the tight dress she was trying on, to which another friend said this in return. Pregnot appears to be a portmanteau of pregnant and not, and therefore forms a word meaning either “not pregnant” or “the opposite of pregnant.” 

#pregnancy #baby #she didn't get that dress

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Kniferism/Forkerism (n.)

I thought the original source from which I saw these words, the wikipedia article for spoonerism, would be best to explain these words. The formation of both of these words is creative and straightforward -  a reevaluation of the term spoonerism to parse out the word spoon and extrapolate to other forms of cutlery, fork and knife, to put a name to similar phenomenons as spoonerisms. While the word spoonerism came from the William Spooner, who was famous for these mix-ups, these nonce words treat -erism as an entire suffix, with cutlery terms acting as the stem.

#fork #knife #spoon #William Archibald Spooner #whatta guy

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Huss (n.)

Last week in class I mentioned the long list of pseudonyms for shark meat that can listed on common products such as lotions, deodorants, lip balms, garden fertilizers, pet food, imitation crab, and many other items. Huss is a common name used for a span of shark species (such as the mud shark and school shark - also known as the “soupfin shark”) that can be found in the UK fish and chip trade. The origin of this British word is unknown, but probably from Middle English.

#sharks #environment #we really out here eating sharks

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Herpe (n.)

“Is that a herpe?

My friend pointed out another friend’s cold sore and asked this question. We mentioned in class the phenomenon of extrapolating suffix rules to words that only appear to contain common suffixes, but actually do not. This is one of those cases. My friend took the word herpes and interpreted the “s” at the end as a plurality suffix -s. By fallaciously removing this “s,” my friend created what he saw as a singular form of herpes, a single herpe.

#std #sti #nice

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WAbservation (n.)

Another Swat-specific word, my WA friend created this portmanteau of the acronym WA and the word observation when explaining a fix he made on his WAee’s essay. 

#writing #art #essay #'

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Lightsout (v.)

“I lightsouted it.”

My friend used this verb to describe how he ended a conversation with someone unsavory in a very abrupt fashion. The word therefore appears to mean “to end suddenly” in this context, similar to how one can quickly plunge a room into darkness by flipping a light switch. I have heard lights-out used as an adjective in the past to describe the time at which I should go to bed and therefore turns my lights out, but I have never heard it used as a verb with a common past tense -ed suffix. 

#lights out #also a cool movie

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Learnguages (v?n?)

“Learnguages at Swarthmore!”

This was the name of one of the special faculty section designed for Swatstruck. The word’s formation, a portmanteau of learn and languages, is much more clear to me than its actual meaning or part of speech. However, it got its point across!

#language #linguistics #swarthmore #lol

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Dropes (n.)

When I had a spec for Swatstruck last week, she told me how in her poetry workshop at her high school, she had to write a poem about a new word she would create. She wrote about her word dropes, which she defined as “the weightless, scary feeling in your stomach when on a roller coaster or in an airplane.” The word sounds similar to other words that indicate downward or falling motion, like drop, drip, and droop. 

#rollarcoaster #stomach #drooooooop

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#sealfie

A hashtag portmanteau of “seal” and “selfie,” I saw this tag on a tweet concerning a recent campaign from PETA to denounce seal hunting. The writer of the tweet was an Inuit girl that argued that ethical seal hunting is an integral part of Inuit culture, and we must consider all cultural perspectives when approaching environmental issues.

#sealfie #selfie #inuit #seals

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Pinkwashing (n.)

I saw this word on one of those snapchat news outlets, PinkNews, oriented towards LGBTQ+ teens. They described it as “pink + whitewashing... originally used to describe companies that claim to support people with breast cancer, while actually profiting from the illness.” Their take on it now, however, is that it is also “a marketing strategy companies use to appear LGBT-friendly, while downplaying negative aspects of their reputation.” 

#pinkwashing #whitewashing #lgbt #they really out here doin this

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Manieth (adj?)

Manieth appears to be the word many with the psuedo-suffix -th, indicating position or placement in a list of things. This “suffix” usually only comes after numbers and it therefore not often productive, but in this case it lends the same implications as it would on the end of a number but instead for a general measurement of quantity, many.

#numbers #math #that ling fb group is a word journal goldmine

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Monoscuits (n.)

“If my calculations are correct, biscuits and Trsicuits hint towards a mysterious third food called ‘monoscuits’”

Assumedly, monoscuit would be a food containing one (1) scuit, whatever that is. Similar to my entry on la brusca, we can make humorous extrapolations for the use of familiar affixes like bi- and tri-  to include other numerical prefixes like mono-, though mono- is Greek and bi- is Latin (tri- can be either Greek or Latin). However, we see mixing of Greek and Latin roots within the same word all the time, like in neuroscience (Greek neuron and Latin scientia) and polyamory (Greek poly and Latin amor), so I believe this person’s intuition is perfectly reasonable.

#triscuit #biscuit #greek #latin #fun