Last winter, here on the East Coast, we witnessed the formation of clever and catchy weather portmanteaus. Remember portmanteaus? We discussed them last summer. Remember summer?
Portmanteau is a term Lewis Carroll coined to describe the combining of the sound and meaning of two words into one.
Before the first crocus sprang in 2010, we were all a little tired of the cutesy winter snowmenclature—Snowpocalypse, Snowmageddon, SnOMG.
Snirt
Last week, during our extensive power outage, I made up one of my own: electrocity. It didn’t catch on. Yesterday, a friend turned me on to a new catch word for the nasty stuff that’s lining our streets these days: snirt.
This morning’s paper has a story of a burglar living in one of the Maryland neighborhoods hit by the power outage. After having hit up several houses and stolen thousands of dollars worth of jewelry, he found a house that had power and broke in. When he realized he was about to get caught, he fled through a window, leaving his cell phone charging in an outlet. I’d call this electrostupurglary.
Snoway we can’t come up with more of these.
Now that we know officially that we won’t be having six more weeks of winter, there’s not much time to come up with more seasonal portmanteaus and get them out of our frigid systems.
Anyone?
Word Nymph 