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During the course of writing my column I had to do a little research.
During this research I discovered that there is a word used to describe the practice of joining two words together in order to form a new word.
The word is “portmanteau”.
I had only heard the word used to describe a small travelling case. As it turns out, Lewis Carroll likened a word such as slithy ( a combination of lithe and slimy) to a small travelling case or ‘portmanteau’ in his book Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.
I like portmanteaus.
I make them up all the time.
I just never knew there was a word for it.
One of my all time favorite portmanteaus was created many years ago by Greg Henkel, my friend and fiddle player in the Flying Fish Sailors. His portmanteau was “extravabonanza”, a combination of the word extravaganza and ‘bonanza’.