Portmanteau the duck into a turkey, was added to the "Oxford English Dictionary" in 2010. Similarly, the word "refudiate" was first used by Sarah Palin when she misspoke, conflating the words "refute" and "repudiate". Though initially a gaffe, the word was recognized as the "New Oxford American Dictionary"s "Word of the Year" in 2010. The business lexicon is replete with newly coined portmanteau words like "permalance" (permanent freelance), "advertainment" (advertising as entertainment), "advertorial" (a blurred distinction between advertising and editorial), "infotainment" (information about entertainment or itself intended to entertain by virtue of its manner of presentation), and "infomercial" (informational commercial). A
Portmanteau in Taglish. Tagalog is a dialect in the island of Luzon and the basis for the national language Filipino. Despite its French etymology (modern spelling: portemanteau), "portmanteau" is not used in French in this context. It is indeed a false friend. It refers to a coat stand or coat hook (literally a "coat support"), but in the past, it could also refer to a cloth drape knights would use to pack their gear. It was in this context that it first came to its English use, and the metaphorical use of a linguistic phenomenon (putting one word inside another, as