The Unspeakable Linguistics of Camp - JSTOR Daily

There’s power in signaling insider knowledge to outsiders, so naturally we see the memetic propagation of idiomatic lore artifacts beyond the bounds of where they actually convey meaning. But as time goes on, their density and alienation from more universal lexicons makes it hard for even the ‘in-group’ to keep track of this internal meaning. It’s ... See more

"Portmanteau words are now a staple of the magazine competition, and amid the waste of failed invention, every so often one meets a need: smog, stagflation, chocoholic. I don't know how we ever did without 'metrosexual', coined by my friend Mark Simpson."

Our highly networked and complex world has given rise to the need for new, hybrid words. As a result, portmanteaus—a linguistic mash-up of two words that means “a large trunk opening in two equal parts” in French—have become a modern necessity. Portmanteaus are not new; Lewis Carroll popularized the use of the term in his book Through the Looking G

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