The Hybird Word

There is simply no doubt about it. You learn things when you read.  Take the example of reading the book, 'The Pun Also Rises.'  It is not simply a collection of puns, but rather a very readable, scholarly dissertation on all aspects of puns, from their origin, to how the brain processes words and meanings that have more than one meaning.  The four-year IBM project that built Watson, the computer that trounced humans on 'Jeopardy,' but failed to recognize that Toronto is not a U.S city is not discussed, but you certainly become aware of what challenges the programmers faced with a multiple-meaning language such as ours.

Take the type of word that is called a 'portmanteau.'  It is a word that is a combination of two or more other words, to come up a new word that has it's own meaning.  I had never heard of the word portmanteau until I read a fairly recent obituary for Michelle Triola, the live-in partner of actor Lee Marvin who sued the actor for support after being his live-in partner for six years. The attorney who represented Mr. Marvin, Marvin Mitchelson, pioneered a defense for the actor that was successful.  The newspapers dubbed the case the 'palimony' case, creating a portmanteau of the words 'pal' and 'alimony' to mean a divorce-type case involving people who weren't married.  This gave flight to words like 'gal-pal'  that have kept tabloids and private investigators busy for years.

The word palimony can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary, and they use the Marvin case in their gray box for attribution.  Scholarly stuff.

So, what does this have to do with puns?  In 'The Pun Also Rises,' the author John Pollack discusses portmanteaus.  He uses 'turducken' as an example.  He's pulling my drumstick, right?  This is something the broadcaster John Madden made up for an NFL halftime show that smashes a turkey, duck and a chicken into a roasted Dodo bird to bulk up linemen with undetectable growth hormones, right?  No.

Mr. Pollack gives us history that traces the Howard Hughes Spruce Goose entree to a Frenchmen, Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de La Reyniere, who wrote about its origins somewhere in eight volumes of "recipes, restaurant reviews, gourmet shopping tips and food commentary" published between  1803 and 1812.  Imagine, restaurant reviews after taking a stagecoach to the place. (If the driver can find it.)

So, is 'turducken' in the Shorter OED?  No.

My only guess is the editors didn't consider John Madden and the NFL to be a worthy example for their gray box. That just makes them plain turkeys.

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