Writer’s Blog & Phrasemanteau

As I’ve been frequently admitting, I haven’t posted very often lately – I have what’s known as Writer’s Blog (writer’s block + blog).  My question is this – is Writer’s Blog a portmanteau?  Technically, since Blog is a combination of Web & Log, I could probably get away with it.  But my actual question, or point (yes, I do have one), is the Phrasemanteau.  I am coining Phrasemanteau to mean a combination of two phrases.  However, as I look at some of my recent phrasemanteaux, I’m noticing they seem to consistently be a combination of ONE phrase and one other random word.  Let’s look at a few, and try to decide if these are truly phrasemanteaux.

First, my favorite – Cream of the Crap.  Wordponents (or phraseponents) are Cream of the Crop, and, well, Crap.  Definition – the best of the worst.  I love when I get a chance to use this term.  But is it a phrasemanteau?  It’s combining only phrase, and one word.  Well, according to my original definition (combination of two phrases), probably not.  I’d like these even more if they contained a portmanteau.  Meaning, Cream of the Crap has all normal words, and no combos…so maybe I’d be more lenient definition-wise if it had some portmaneaux.

Agriculture Shock – a shock to agriculture, a combination of agriculture and culture shock.  This one I came up with the (potential) phrasemanteau first, then gave it a definition.  I think there was some Agriculture Shock down in Florida pretty recently…termed the “Florida Freeze” in the Wall Street Journal article.  According to the article, quite a few fruits were impacted, quite a noticable shock to the agriculture.  But back to the question at hand, is agriculture shock just a phrase of it’s own??  Considering the definition, it could be considered a shock to the agriculture.  I also believe that the existence of “culture shock” as a phrase DOES help the catchiness of “agriculture shock.”  Quite the debate…so I’ll just avoid weighing in for now.

Last, but not least, a shout-out to my blogging neighbor.  Welcome to a new blog – A Change Of Eatery – a blog about Connecticuisine and events in the Hartford area.  Anyway, back to word combusiness.  The name of the blog is a combination of “a change of scenery” and “eatery.”  If I were to force a regular portmanteau into the name, it would wind up as “a change of sceatery.”  Frankly, not nearly as cool & catchy of a name.  This is one of those tough realizations for me, when a phrase without a portmanteau sounds better than with.  Perhaps I can rationalize preferring A Change of Eatery by declaring it a Phrasemanteau.

Honestly, I don’t know if any of these are actually phrasemanteau, but since I don’t have any better examples, these will suffice.  If these are just cool phrases, then great.  Phrasemanteau is in the eye of the beholder, and these sound fun to me!