Blended e-realities, blended words

The coinage of neologisms is, by no means, a new phenomenon in the history of the English language. Novel words demonstrate the productivity of any language while at the same time serve to attest to new realities and societal changes. Over the last decades, however, we are witnessing an unprecedented revolution led by the widespread use of electronic devices (mobile phones, tablets, laptops and netbooks, to name but a few), and the consolidation of the Internet as an indispensable global network which provides plentiful resources. This technological ‘brave new world’ has led speakers to search for ways to conceptualise new realities, which lately are characterised by being all-in-one devices: for instance, smartphones are progressively replacing single-purpose devices such as full cameras or GPS navigators.

This tendency towards hybrid technologies has been conspicuously reflected in recently coined words, many of which are ‘blends’ or combinations of two – or, more rarely, three – source words into one through ‘simple concatenation or through concatenation coupled with overlap of shared phonological segments’ (Kelly, Reference Kelly1998: 579). That is to say, the merger between words becomes apparent both in the form (or morphology) and meaning of the new blended lexical item. Some present-day epitomes of technological hybridity are phablet (<phone + tablet), vlog (<video + blog), adware (<advertisement + software), mactel (<Macintosh + Intel) or even machinima (<machine + cinema) ‘an animated film created entirely on a computer and “filmed” using computer game technology or graphics software’.

One may wonder why blends have been – and still are – so popular in general language use and specific fields such as electronic devices or advancements. One possible answer is that blends may convey information more effectively than two different words. This would be true if all blends were transparent, that is, if their meanings were quickly retrieved. Unfortunately, this is not applicable in most cases; as Lehrer (Reference Lehrer2003: 371) points out, blends ‘don't increase efficiency. In fact, they create more effort to interpret – at least at first, until readers and hearers have figured out what the source words are and what they mean.’

Other authors point out their similarity with word plays. Kelly even calls them ‘lexical teases’ (Reference Kelly1998: 586). Yet, it seems that the main motivations behind their popular coinage go far beyond mere playfulness. To quote Lehrer again, ‘We are surrounded by stimuli vying for our attention (newspapers, magazines, radio, TV) and thousands of advertisements in all of the above. Therefore, using a novel clever word is likely to catch our attention and get us read or listen to what is being presented. Then when a word-formation device like blending becomes common, other speakers and writers create similar forms by analogy simply because it is fashionable to do so; they want to show that they, too, are trendy, creative, and cool.’ (Reference Lehrer and Munat2007: 116)

Almost a decade on, this idea is still relevant, but nowadays it is difficult not to find people – especially among the young – immersed in their online activities without even noticing the surrounding environment. Hence, the target audience of this type of attention-grabbing words is now mainly composed of netizens, who are most of the time ‘connected’ to their devices and linked social media virtually all the time.

This, together with the speaker's expressive needs arising out of the creation and extended use of electronic devices, are central to an understanding of the invention of such words as ringxiety (<ring + anxiety), defined as ‘the confusion experienced by a group of people when a cell phone rings and no one is sure whose phone it is; mistaking a faint sound for the ringing of one's cell phone’Footnote ¹ or geeksta (<geek + gangsta) rap ‘a form of rap music with lyrics relating to computers, technology, and engineering’Footnote ² .

Given the vast number of words denoting technology and blended realities, in the next section I will proceed to analyse and sort out my data into categories. The criteria followed to establish the classification below are based on the form of these words (i.e. their morphology) and their sound patterns (or phonological make-up) to a lesser extent.

A taxonomy of cyber-blends

This section will provide an overview of different types of cyber-blends based on the data collected over the period of fifteen years (2000–2015). Since dictionaries cannot keep up with the constantly increasing number of lexical items coined, I made use of two online databases of neologisms, namely Word Spy (<www.wordspy.com>) and The Rice University Neologisms Database (<neologisms.rice.edu>), to retrieve truly novel blends. This preliminary work resulted in a total of 1133 words from the Rice Database and 301 words from Word Spy. Out of these, I produced a list of provisional blends in the field of new technologies, which is undoubtedly one of the most fertile areas nowadays. This shows the newness and ‘trendiness’ of this type of word, which simultaneously signify two realities that have emerged from the use of new technologies, namely smartphones, computers or mobile phones.

The trends identified are thus grounded in quantitative data. Likewise, it is important to state that the small sample of words described may be ephemeral creations and disappear altogether along the realities they signify, as it occurred with Windows Messenger chat service, which was in vogue at the beginning of the new millennium but now is completely outdated. Only time will tell.

Within the general categories of electronic devices, the greater frequency of use of specific words (e.g. LOL, web, internet, and blog) and extra-linguistic entities (Google, Facebook, twitter, etc.) makes a further classification into sub-categories possible:

1. (1) ‘Words which share web as a common element’. Besides well-known examples (e.g. webcam (<web + camera) or webinar (<web + seminar)), there are others such as webjack (<web + hijack) ‘to redirect a legal site address to an illegal website’, webvertise (<web + advertise) ‘to advertise on the web’, webisode (<web + episode) ‘a television episode made to be watched online’, webonics (<web + ebonics) ‘the language employed by internet users during online game play as well as in weblogs and forums’ or wedsite (<wedding + website) ‘a website in which a couple updates information about their wedding’.

2. (2) ‘Internet-based words’. Some of them include Internot (<Internet + not) ‘not having full access to the Internet’, splinternet (<splinter + Internet) ‘the internet splintered into multiple segments, streams, or classes based on factors such as cost, speed, platform, or political motivations’Footnote ³ , or sneakernet (<sneaker + network) ‘the transfer of files from one computer to another using external hard or removable drives’.

3. (3) ‘Blog-based blends’. It is worth noting that the items of this third category may involve split and subsequent letter re-combinations. For instance, fake in flog (<fake + blog) has been segmented into an f, which, even though it does not correspond to a syllable, acquires meaning on its own when combined with log. In those cases, both source words treated independently pose no problem for the cyber reader to understand the resulting blend: the meaning of vlog -that is, ‘a video blog’– is directly derived from video and blog, and the same applies to blogebrity (<blog + celebrity) ‘a popular blogger’.

   However, one may initially experience some difficulties in understanding more infrequent words such as splog (<spam + blog), blogiary (<blog + diary) and doucheblog (<douchebag + blog), if these have not been previously encountered and are presented decontextualised, without any gloss or explanation of the source words besides.

4. (4) ‘Names of social networking services in combination with existing words’:

   1. (4.1) ‘Instagram’, embedded in Dronestagram (<drone + Instagram) ‘posts of aerial pictures’ or Instaglam (<Instagram + glamour) ‘term used in make-up advertising to encourage people to submit glamorous pictures’ or ‘an event hosted by Good Morning America where people submit pictures to Instagram to have a chance at this makeover’Footnote ⁴ .

   2. (4.2) ‘Facebook’ in drunkbook (<drunk + Facebook) ‘to write on Facebook under the influence of alcohol’, facecrook (<Facebook + crook) ‘an individual who uses Facebook to commit, plan, or talk about a crime’ or failbook (<fail + Facebook)-used derogatorily to refer to Facebook.

   3. (4.3) ‘Twitter’ in Twitterverse (<Twitter + universe) ‘postings on Twitter considered collectively’; twitticism, based on the word witticism to which the coiner has added a ‘t’ to specify the source of that witty remark; twimmolation (<Twitter + immolation) ‘the ruin of a person's reputation because of insensitive Twitter posts’, twintern (<Twitter + intern) ‘an intern responsible for monitoring and submitting messages on a company's social media accounts’.

   Interestingly, there is another major trend of words which use tweet as a root: among others, tweetheart (< Tweet + heart), which playfully draws on the phonetically similar sweetheart, ‘someone who loves Twitter and uses it a great deal’; twitchfork (<Twitter + pitchfork) ‘an organised campaign on Twitter to express discontent or attack targets’, subtweet (<subliminal + tweet) ‘a subliminal tweet’, and tweetup (<Tweet + meetup) ‘a real world meeting between people who know each other through Twitter’.

5. (5) The search engine Google has also prompted the creation of blended forms such as google fu (<Google + kung fu) ‘ability to use Google to find the information one seeks quickly’ and googledygook (<Google + gobbledygook), which, curiously enough, has adopted several meanings. According to the Rice Neologisms Database Footnote ⁵ , it means ‘hits returned by a Google search which have little or no relation to the intended object of the search’ whereas Urban Dictionary Footnote ⁶ defines it as ‘the unintelligible HTML code spat out by Google websites when you cut and paste a hyperlink to a page into some other document or web site’.

6. (6) The use of mobile phones and its associated tendency to promote abbreviated forms of language (notably in SMS messaging) has also given way to words such as mobisode (<mobile + episode) ‘a short programme or highlights from a longer one intended to be viewed on a small mobile screen’, mupload (<mobile + upload) ‘uploading content from a mobile phone to a website without a computer’, intexticated (<intoxicated + text) ‘a person constantly concerned with reading or sending text messages’, smishing (<SMS + phishing) ‘an attempt to deceive a person into giving personal information by pretending to be a trustworthy entity in e-communication’, or smexting (<smoking + texting) ‘texting on a mobile phone during a break for smoking’. The last two may possibly have been created by analogy with sexting as they also refer to two actions performed at the same time. Likewise, there are also terms based on the initials LOL such as lolbertarian (<LOL + libertarian) ‘libertarian whose views are so extreme as to invite mockery’Footnote ⁷ , lolarious (<LOL + hilarious) and lollertaining (< LOL + entertaining), both of which jocularly refer to something very comical.

7. (7) The last group comprises what I have deemed to be ‘self-terms’, as they foreground the importance of the individual in today's consumerist society. Some of these are narcisstick (<narcissistic + selfie stick) ‘a pejorative name for a selfie stick’, meformer (<me + informer) ‘a user who posts photographs or status updates about himself/herself’, and ussie ‘a picture taken by one of the participants of the group photo’, word derived by the analogous derivative form selfie (<self + ie). That is why in the database its etymology is explained as a combination of us + selfie although there is not a formal parallel between the two terms and the blend.

One just needs to consider the remarkable instability of words sharing blog as one of the two source words (e.g. blogebrity, flog, vlog, blogject, etc.), or to compare pairs of words such as mobisode (<mobile + episode) – mupload (<mobile + upload) or vlog (<video + blog) – vidiot (<video + idiot), to notice how the same words (i.e. mobile, video) have been differently clipped to create a harmonious fusion. The same can be applied to Twitter/tweet, in which the variation is even more noticeable (e.g. in tweetup, twimmolation, twintern, twitchfork or even twitticism) because of the two different existing word-forms (twit and tweet).

The evidence leads me to think that we are witnessing the formation of an established pattern of what Frath (Reference Frath2005) calls ‘hamburger type’ in our everyday technological domain. According to Frath (Reference Frath2005: 6), the ‘hamburger type’ or ‘h-type blends’ initially started as blend creations (the prototypical case quoted is cheeseburger <cheese + hamburger – hence the name of the paradigm) but subsequently began to function as parts of regular compounds in which the meaning of the blend was transferred to the final part of the word (e.g., –burger → tofuburger or –capade → sexcapade or boozecapade). Only time and the frequency of use will ratify if word components based on blog and twitter/tweet can achieve autonomy and thus start to be used productively, as happened with the sequel series (e.g. interquel and prequel) or the literati series (digerati, glitterati, etc.).

As regards their sound or phonological component, as already hinted, there is also a certain degree of fusion implicit in some of the blends compiled. This has underlying semantic motivations. As Brdar-Szabó & Brdar (Reference Brdar-Szabó and Brdar2008: 176) suggest, ‘the reduction in the conceptual distance between the input words is signalled by the reduction of their phonological distance, i.e. by their fusion’. This fusion can be attested not only in vowel overlaps as in wikiality (<Wikipedia + reality), twimmolation (<Twitter + immolation), tweetup (<tweet + meetup), or webonics (<web + ebonics), but also in vowel + consonant overlaps (e.g. wedsite [<wedding + website] or narcisstick [<narcissistic + selfie stick]).

Final remarks

As a concluding comment, it is worth restating that the words previously described may become dated as their technological referents become obsolete. Still, I believe, other blends may stand the test of time and prove to be more than simple nonce formations. This has already been exhibited by well-established lexis in the field of new technologies such as malware.

The patterns (such as the blog, Internet, or web- based words) and individual lexical creations examined epitomise the complexity and wit behind the creation of these short, yet powerful, word fusions. Blends are much more than clipped juxtapositions of source words: their coinage involves playing with sounds, sense relations and, all in all, reversing our expectations as to what we consider to be existing and ‘permissible’ words. Consequently, decoding a novel blend poses a challenge to the reader/hearer, who has to recognise the source words and infer the intended meaning. This makes lexical blending a unique form of word ‘game’ which invites us to use our creative skills to their fullest potential.