| 词源 |
portmanteau word. A portmanteau traveling bag is a leather suitcase that opens flat into two parts. It gave its name to words made up of two parts like brunch, composed of breakfast and lunch, and smog, composed of smoke and fog. The traveling bag was so named from the French word portmanteau in the late 16th century, but portmanteau word was coined by Lewis Car- roll in Through the Looking-Glass (1872), when Humpty Dumpty, who could be called the etymologist of the story, ex- plains the meanings of some of its words: “Well, ‘slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy.’ . . . You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed into one word.” See motel. |