It’s up there with wearing your trousers so low that your butt appears to be hanging around your knees.
The phenomenon I speak of is portmanteau, in which two words are combined to form another.
Although it is not new — think smoke and fog for “smog” or breakfast and lunch for “brunch” — it is experiencing a kind of renaissance that coincides with the general dumbing-down of language by the global news media and the rise of celebrity gossip culture.
As far as I can tell, this latest phase all started back in 2002 when big-bootied Latino songstress Jennifer Lopez got together with actor Ben Affleck. The pair were christened “Bennifer” by asinine Hollywood gossip rags.
This was quickly followed by “Brangelina,” a hybrid of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, before “TomKat” was invented to describe Tom Cruise and his mid-life-crisis hook-up with starlet Katie Holmes.
Then it started getting silly, permeating the world of geopolitics with “Chindia,” coined by lazy journalists so that they could refer to the world’s two fastest growing economies in one word instead of three.
Lately, US President Barack Obama jumped on the bandwagon when he lumped Afghanistan and Pakistan together into a convenient, all-bases-covered, al-Qaeda-encompassing mass with “AfPak.”
But South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo daily took it too far in 2007, coining “Chaiwan” to describe the combined economic power of Taiwan and the Chicoms.
The reason I mention it now is that this Chaiwan story has been doing the rounds in the Chinese-language media this week — part of the pan-blue media’s propaganda push for even closer cross-strait ties, I suspect. Come on … is it possible for us to get any closer without having to stick our nose in their sweaty Chicom armpits?
The Koreans have us half swallowed by China even before Prez Ma has had the chance to complete his sacred mission of unification.
The South Koreans have now managed to piss off the Chicoms with their ridiculous neologism, with the China Daily Web site on June 3 quoting Zhang Guanhua (張冠華), humorless deputy director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of Taiwan Studies, as saying that Chaiwan “wrongly puts China and Taiwan side-by-side, when Taiwan is part of China.”
Trust me, Comrade Zhang, this is not the kind of name rectification we independence supporters had in mind, either.
How would the South Koreans like it, for instance, if we started mucking around with their national title and joining it with that of their archenemy?
Stick North Korea and South Korea together and you come up with “Nouth Korea,” or “Norea.”
That’s enough bastardization for one day.
I’m off for a frappucino, a slice of banoffee pie and a lie down in a darkened room.
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