Word: portmanteau
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...singer blond gone Hollywood, but with a more conventional softness. Only Betty had the whole package. She was vivacious, pretty, a Nobel-dynamite-winning thrush, an appealing actress who excelled in comedy and, if a director could just tamp down her pile-driving instincts, drama. TIME, searching for the portmanteau mot juste, was obliged to hatch a new one: "cinemusicomedienne...
...hard to tell. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer used "realism" a dozen times last week to explain, defend and justify the Administration's rhetoric: "The message the President is sending is that his foreign policy is going to be based on reality." Oh? That word is a handy portmanteau for just about any policy the Administration might adopt, but it doesn't clarify a thing. So let's take a little tour d'horizon, as the diplomats say, through the issues that are raising red flags...
...hard to tell. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer used "realism" a dozen times last week to explain, defend and justify the Administration's rhetoric: "The message the President is sending is that his foreign policy is going to be based on reality." Oh? That word is a handy portmanteau for just about any policy the Administration might adopt, but it doesn't clarify a thing. So let's take a little tour d'horizon, as the diplomats say, through the issues that are raising red flags...
...significant drop in the coverage of blue-blooded polo players and yacht skippers; such new categories as arrests, court cases and resignations have been added. The column's length, however, has remained about the same, as have the extreme compression of the form and the sometimes ingenious portmanteau descriptives. Dinah Shore was once referred to as a "scorch singer," Silent Film Comic Harry Langdon as a "deadpantomimer," and Mickey Rooney as a "Hardy family perennial." No longer in use are the TIME-coined neologisms that once peppered the section, such as "socialite," "tennist" (tennis player) and the myriad variations...
...more is more. In Sauce for the Goose, subplots sprout out of subplots. He even deploys amnesia in one story line, forgetting just why the line began in the first place. No pratfall is beneath him. His pun can still be mightier than his word, and he delights in portmanteau items, as in the case of the little band of fundamentalists who obstinately refuse to cut their "umbibli-cal" cord. But at times his verbal games can become so outrageous that you can't see de words for De Vries...