Word of the day: Malamanteau

 

Interestingly enough, this word wasn’t up to the standards of Wikipedia and the article has been deleted:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AMalamanteau

 

From the Urban Dictionary:

A neologism for a portmanteau created by incorrectly combining a malapropism with a neologism. It is itself a portmanteau of 'malapropism' and 'portmanteau'.

"That was textuous."

 

Of course, it’s always possible this was a low level hoax.  e.g. "It was created by webcomic creator Randall Munroe of xkcd and was deleted as being made up."

But still – isn’t it a word we could use?

http://sesquiotic.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/malamanteau/ has other examples:

“And it’s still useful – it’s by far the tidiest way to refer to words such as misunderstimate, refudiate, insinuendo, bewilderness, flustrated, ambiviolent, and misconscrewed (it up). So it has clear value as a word. It fills a gap neatly. It’s a nice malamute to add to the dog team on the linguistic sled of meaning.