Word: portmanteau
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...London stage in 1841? In the chronology of the English comedy of manners, Anglo-Irish Dion Boucicault flounders between the astringency of Sheridan and the epigrams of Wilde. Yet he took a romantic's delight in character. London Assurance is peopled with enough eccentrics to fill the portmanteau of a Victorian novel. Welding this strength to the polished ensemble skills of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Adapter-Director Ronald Eyre has transformed an old chestnut into a parody of what is already a near parody of Restoration comedy...
...Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess created a wall-to-wall nightmare in which society dissolves into violence and repression. The condition is reflected in the breakdown of language into "nadsat," a jumble of portmanteau constructions ("He looked a malenky bit poogly when he viddied the four of us"). To Burgess, language is the breath of civilization. Cut it short and society suffocates. That is an insight worth pondering. For if the world is to resist the nadsat future, readers and writers of both sexes must resist onefully any meaningless neologisms. To do less is to encourage another manifestation of prejudice-against...
...that each event should have its own world championship. This solution is hardly likely, if only because Montreal has been promised an Olympics and the U.S.S.R. is already pressing for Moscow Games in 1980. Others contend that the Olympics would be immeasurably improved by the elimination of "shamateurism"-a portmanteau term designed to describe the practice, common among Iron Curtain and some other countries, of subsidizing their "amateur" athletes as fully as any professionals. Those who favor such government support call for an "open" Olympics in which professional and amateur athletes would compete, much as they do in tennis...
...cyclamate furor bubbled over this fall, few Americans paid much heed to the minute lettering on their cakes and candy bars, diet drinks and instant dinners. Even a magnifying glass was little help in explaining those obscure polysyllables: propylene glycol, calcium silicate, butylated hydroxyanisole, sorbitan monostearate, methylparaben. Today, the portmanteau word for such substances is "additives"-which translates into myriad chemicals that have made even bread a laboratory product and the cheese spread to put on it a test-tube concoction...
Allies, Not Adversaries. When pressed to define his political outlook, Brooke offers such portmanteau labels as "creative moderate" or "a liberal with a conservative bent." While accepting the humanitarian goals of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, he faults the Administration's approach to helping the poor as "aspirin?it relieves the pain, but it doesn't cure." Both domestic-welfare and foreign-aid policies, he reasons, should be oriented more toward self-help and less toward the dole approach. "If you give a man a handout," he maintains, "you establish a chain of dependence and lack of self-respect that...