Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Any Portmanteau In A Storm

You know what's really depressing?  The word "edutainment" doesn't even sound weird to me anymore. How did that happen?  Is it a symptom of our modern world that we're making up more words now?  Or am I just old enough that I've finally experienced the complete creation of words from coining to acceptance.

It's not just that: I'm totally accepting when the weather forecast calls for "tornadic" activity. Tornadoes have been around for a while, surely we haven't just started to need that word. L. Frank Baum didn't need to describe Dorothy being taken to Oz by tornatic activity. Okay, it could be that global warming is shifting climate systems to the point that we need new words to talk about them.  After all, we should really come up with a name for one of those storms that dumps snow up the U.S. Eastern Seaboard while missing most of Canada. How about an "ironicane?"

And then there's this Winterish we've been experiencing in Southern Ontario.  We experienced a frigiweek (one week of genuine winter) but since then it's been subjectemps (temperatures that seem really warm, even though we'd find them frightfully cold if we experienced them in the fall.)

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