Word: portmanteau
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Waite Phillips is a jut-jawed, beetle-browed Oklahoma oiligarch who likes portmanteau words based on his name. Such are the Philturn Rockymountain Scoutcamp ("Phillips" riveted to "good turn"), Philmont (his 300,000-acre New Mexico ranch), Philtower and Philcade (his skyscrapers at Tulsa). Oiligarch Phillips last week did a good turn at Tulsa, where the Philbrook Art Center was opened. Its aim: to make culture gush in an oil town once called (by Harper's Magazine) a "cultural Sahara...
...looked up Mr. Eustace Tilley this week, on the eve of his departure from the city-his 'maiden' departure, as he pointed out. The elegant old gentleman was found in his suite at the Plaza, his portmanteau packed, his mourning doves wrapped in clotted swiss, his head in a sitz bath for a last shampoo. Everywhere, scattered about the place, were grim reminders of his genteel background: a cold bottle of Tavel on the lowboy, a spray of pinks in a cut-glass bowl, an album held with a silver clasp, and his social-security card copied...
...suggest a linotyper's nightmare, he is not really so difficult. Not a writer to be nodded over or dipped into at random, neither does he try to catch the reader napping. If he is read as carefully as he writes, he has few Joycean perplexities (aside from portmanteau words and puns); what looks like a puzzling shorthand will resolve itself into a longhand of his own invention, painstaking and descriptive. His latest, like his best-known book (The Enormous Room), is a diary; it is also a manifesto of the rights of man-as-artist, man-as-individual...
...happened last year when Dr. Halibut Fish was certified as an accumulator of concentrated Vitamin A in his liver. His Vitamin D content was less significant. Abbott Laboratories of Chicago and Parke, Davis fortified A-rich halibut liver oil with viosterol (a concentrated Vitamin D), called the product haliver (portmanteau for halibut liver) oil with viosterol, and exploited the trade name Haliver so vigorously, that Mead Johnson last month took six consecutive pages of advertising in one journal to remind doctors, in large sultry yellow, type, that "The Fish's . . . Name . . . Is . . . Halibut...
...insurance companies, desire for burial in hallowed ground and insurance payments to heirs, constrain many a suicide to disguise his act. Commonest disguise is to "fall" or "jump" from a high place, an act for which the New York Times has suggested the ambiguous, legally safe portmanteau word "flump" (TIME, Sept...