Words, Words, and More Words

I’ve been asked to comment further on the nature of portmanteau words and to give an example. Thanks for the prompt, Compooper Teacher!

First, a portmanteau word isn’t the same as a synonym, homonym, or contranym. I hope all my readers know what a synonym is, and if you don’t know (warning: here comes the teacher in me), look it up.
Homonyms are words that sound the same, may or may not be spelled differently, and have different meanings, such as wight and white, or the two meanings of bear (the animal, and to carry). Finally, as Compooper Teacher points out, a contranym is a word that carries within itself at least two meanings that can be opposites of one another, for example, (and I quote) “left (remaining) and left (having gone).”

But a portmanteau word isn’t exactly any of those three, though it may make use of those similarities (in the case of synonym and homonym) or differences (in the case of contranym). A portmanteau word is
* generally one word—though it may function as part of a phrase or clause
* a word that is composed of several other words, of any language,
* put together in such a way as to be at least marginally intelligible, though it may take some work, possibly even some research, and as in my case, even the help of others, to understand it,
* and once deciphered, it yields a richer meaning in more economical form than would have resulted if the writer simply used the original, individual words.
This is why critics often speak of “Joycean economy”—he says a great deal in very few words, though those words may be mightily challenging to read.

So, examples. Here are two from Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake:
* "Echoland": This is one of the words Joyce uses when writing about England, and this one word conflates the sense of an echo with the actual name of the nation. In this way, he expresses his condemnation of England as a colonizer of Ireland, a colonizer trying to remake Ireland in its own image, and yet, not a true copy, just as an echo is not a true copy, but a weaker, quieter one. So now instead of reading simply “England, the country that colonized Ireland,” we get a sense also of Joyce’s attitude toward that colonization.
* “The fall of a once wallstrait oldparr"--this phrase from the first page of the novel includes at least four references:
1. At the surface of the action, the fall of a bricklayer, the Finnegan of the title of the novel Finnegans Wake (and the Irish folk song of the same title), who was once alive ("wallstrait") but has fallen off his ladder and died (no fear—Finnegan will be revived at his wake when a mourner spills a little beer on him—“Lots of fun at Finnegans wake!” as the song says);
2. The fall of Adam, because “oldparr” suggests “old father” or father of us all;
3. The Wall Street ("wallstrait") crash of 1929;
4. The declining cultural knowledge of Irish legends, since “parr” is another word for salmon, which was a magical fish, the fish of the wisdom of gods and heroes, in Irish mythology.
So this one seven-word phrase includes two portmanteau words and alludes to four foundational texts: the story of the bricklayer, the fall, the crash, and Irish legend. So we know right away, if we've read the whole page anyway, that we're reading a story of beginnings (and ends that will engender other beginnings), beliefs, and cultural backgrounds.

But portmanteau words aren’t all this dense and difficult—many are fun and enlightening. If you read the Lewis Carroll poem "Jabberwocky," you can find a number of funny and relatively obvious (once you know what you're looking for ;) ) examples of English portmanteau words there:
"chortle," combining the concepts of a chuckle and a snort, hence a whole different sound from either of the originals;
"whiffling," which means something between a sniffle and a whistle;
"slithy," meaning both slimy and writhing;
and "galumphing," a triumphant gallop.
There are others, but these are probably the clearest. Check it out:
"Jabberwocky"

So, sorry to have put on my teacher face for so long, but hey, maybe you learned something, and once again, you asked for it! :D