Imagine putting two different words into a blender. Press the 'start' button and voila! It's like making lemonade: you throw away what you don't need, and keep the essence. The result is a new, fresh word tightly packed with meanings - a blend. A blend is a word made up of parts of two or more words. There are no specific rules - you take something from the first word, something from the second and there it is - new meaning(s), new ways of using it, making numerous possibilities for creating new words. This trend has been very popular recently and the outcome of blending is a lot of neologisms. Let me illustrate what I actually mean.
bit : Have you ever asked yourselves how this word was actually named? Here's the solution - you take binary, blend it up a bit with digit and, finally, this is what you get - bit - such a little word carrying so much semantic content!
Let's take a look at some other examples of blends:
guesstimate: a combination of guess and estimate
screenager: screen + teenager = a person who spends hours and hours in front of the TV set - what a good description of a typical teenager, don't you think?
transistor: transfer + resistor (here's one older word)
celesbian- a lesbian celebrity
blog- a blog is your 'web diary', your 'web log' That's how blog was created.
These are only a few examples of this extremely productive process of creating new words. Our 'duty' is only to keep our eye on new blends, or to simply be creative and make new blends that will meet our needs. Let me try :
Bregards! (My message is: best regards!)
No comments:
Post a Comment