Author: Afutami

A couple of days ago, I was tickled by Jack’s conception of ‘language sandwich’ in Emma Donoghue’s Room where he made up two-fold words like ‘hugermous’ (from huge and enormous). Just a night before, I tweeted something about ‘extrhausted’ (from extra and exhausted) to give more weight on the worn-out state. Later, Nico Novito enlightened me by popping-up with the correct label for such self-made products and it’s called ‘portmanteau’!
(Originally a French word, we could guess?)

A portmanteau, as elucidated on Wikipedia, is a blend of two (or more) words or morphemes into one new word–usually both sounds and meanings. Take smog, for instance, was coined by collaborating smoke and fog. Funny thing, ‘portmanteau’ is also a portmanteau, derived from the word port(e) in French (means ‘door’) and ‘manteau’ (means jacket)!
(Surprising how semantics can always surprise you, eh?)

“Hey, Mom, I can’t eat my breakfast without the spork!”
(Spoon and fork, that is correct.)

The following examples are probably familiar to our ears (although a bit rarer to our eyes):

• Blaccent: black and accent (when a non-black tries to sound black)
• Bootylicious: booty and delicious (who doesn’t know this Destiny’s Child song?)
• Bromance: bro(ther) and romance
• Brunch: breakfast and lunch (the regular two-in-one meal for mahasiswa)
• Camcorder: camera and recorder (a very helpful appliance)
• Cocacolonization: Coca-Cola and colonization (a phenomenon that is also learned as an issue of international relations)
• Cyborg: cybernetic (whatever that means) and organism
• Linguogasm: lingua and orgasm (the sensation that comes up when you’re awed because of the hidden maze inside languages!)
• Frenemy: friend and enemy (SBY might want to borrow this one in explaining our foreign policy, don’t you think?)
• Mathlete: math and athlete (two subjects that would make a guy experting in both as some sort of god for the ladies)
• Newscast: news and broadcast

How did you guys find it? Interesting? I believe that in the world of language, another word for ‘art’ is ‘portmanteau’. It may also be referred as the art of ‘creating’ with language. (Bear in mind that it’s ‘with’ language and not exactly the ‘language‘ because unless you’re the government in charge of a newborn nation like Soekarno or Ataturk, you can never ‘create’ language.) Good night!

*Credits to Adisty for the correction and interesting facts ♥

Alright, this post is totally going to be freakish and preposterous.
Kindly bear with it.

Imagine ‘language’ as a concrete, vivid being. What would it be like? Is it transparent? What color does it come with? If defined in French, would it be a male noun or a female one?

The language (or languages, since we actually have more than one) I’ve claimed as my best friend for years has always been in a form of remarkably clever young lady that kindly spares hours on my working desk during semester breaks. ‘She’ surprises you every now and then with unexplainable dimensions of grammar rules, metaphors, and oxymorons.

Another form of language that is awkwardly engraved in my mind would be a box of riddles. This box is, somehow, blue. See, language is obviously not a humble being. Instead, it is a conceited creature that doesn’t care if you don’t understand what it tries to convey. Thenceforth, I imagine that the box would always be self-centric in the manifestation.

Blue is, whether or not you realize it, the color that is mostly used in language metaphors. ‘Out of blue moon’, ‘I’m feeling blue’, or ‘darah biru‘ (‘blue blood’, a metaphor for royal offsprings) are just a number of examples. There are probably more, not just in English but also in other exotic languages on the land of Arab and Africa.

Err–the point of this post would be, that if language had a color, it shall be blue.

Probably I shouldn’t have posted this. And you shouldn’t have read this.
This post is just some random bull crap in a Monday morning.

(With courtesy of Guinandra L. Jatikusumo)

Laughing used to be an active verb that requires you to lively–sometimes overratingly–shout ‘Hahaha!’ with your head moving back and forth according to your unique rythm. Yet once these genius came up with live chat programmes, i.e. Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, Skype, as well as other similar appliances, you have to laugh virtually. Now we can actually laugh without really laughing.

There comes the problem: how should we laugh in texts?

Let’s stop there and look backward a little bit. Who invented words like ‘cock-a-doodle-doo’, ‘woof’, or ‘moo’ to imitate the noise made by animals? To observe the pattern, these words were created according to the sound it produces. This is also why, these animals seem to have different way of communicating in different parts of the world. For instance, an Indonesian chicken cries ‘kukuruyuk!’ and an Indonesian dog yells ‘gukguk!’ instead. There are also some special Turkish words for the voice of cats and frogs yet I couldn’t remember.

Now imagine yourself as the someone who lived decades ago, sitting on your desk and frowning because you couldn’t find the rhyme-word to explain that a girl is laughing in a direct speech. How would you consider writing it down? Probably you’d in the end pick ‘hahaha’ because it’s the easiest, first thing that come up to your mind as that’s how it actually sounds.

Today, several people think that it is simply ineffective to write ‘hahaha’ on a chat window when you can compact it down to ‘LOL’ (the same notion goes to ‘be right back’, ‘talk to you later’, and many other familiar phrases), although, there are some conservatives who still prefer to use ‘hahaha’ for a more natural effect it yields.

Just when I thought that these were the only possible ways to laugh virtually, a friend of mine–with no serious purpose–put a Facebook status asking how people from different countries laugh in their texts.

I was like, “WOOOOT?!” How on earth can I not know about it?
Very intriguing, eh?

I start thinking that it apparently is possible to create a thesis on ‘Language and Identities through Globalization’.

Another interesting fact it that Oxford has now acknowledged ‘LOL’ as one of English words. It is, then, not impossible that ‘555’ can one day be put in a Thai dictionary.

I mean, who knows? Language is sexily very, very dynamic.