Portmanteau

Just today one of my very good friends commented about my introduction to my blog that it is a tinge incorrect. His point was that I was using a 'contraction' and so I couldn't (!) really say that it was three words when it was really four.

For those who DON'T understand what contractions are - other than the normal ones you hear about in a medical or nowadays in any arbitrary sitcoms - contractions is the term used by linguistics as the formation of a new word by the use of two or more individual words which in common belief is supposed to create a more flowing sound. But then I tried to read on further because I always thought that the Oxford English Dictionary had incorporated the word Don't in their dictionary (which they have), and that led me to find out more interesting things.

For example, those who DON'T use DON'T, SHOULDN'T really be using "cannot" because that too is what you call a portmanteau or a contraction. The difference between portmanteau and contraction is that portmanteau is only a word formed by blend of two words and not necessarily the meanings. Anyways, anyway is another such combined form of a word.

Soon, after spending about half an hour on the internet with directed searching I learned more words and more definitions such as Syncope, Elision, Synalepha, Inflectional Suffixes etc etc. Not only did I understand that the linguistics used as much if not more terminology that us followers of science do but also they are very rigid about it.

For example it takes a research paper (1) published about 16 years back, to be able to come up with any kind of solid evidence that these words such as can't, don't shouldn't have been incorporated in the formal English Language.


What this paper talks about is a historical basis of how the contraction n't has historically progressed from being only a contraction to a suffix of the inflectional kind. Apparently a word only gets to be incorporated formally in the lexicons only after it has stood the test of time.

It suited me. But still I wanted more proof. And that led me to the American Psychological Association Style Guide, aka the APA style guide. And apparently, not very different from our very close IUPAC (for the mere mortals it means International Union for Pure and Applied Chemistry), APA decides how to go about writing names and order of headings, formatting, and organization of comments and references, and the arrangement of tables, figures and footnotes and appendices, as well as other manuscript and documentation features. I realise this style of writing is not confined to only the social sciences but also they way we document our work, in a journal, proposal, homework etc. However the APA does not state rules for informal writing does it?

So that leads me to check whether blog is a formal or informal form of publication? And from what I found other than a few interviews of scientists who blog and other not so relevant information sources, that Blog ISNT a formal way of publication. You can call it a publication because you do hit the publish button in order to release it to the rest of the world. But one cannot use this as references in another formal form of publication. Which somehow removes the burden from us, mere bloggers, to not pay so much attention to the APA style guide. Whats more surprising and probably in a way contradictory is that it is formal to use the phrase "don't" when having a conversation because it not the same when writing the same on paper. Then what about video blogs. If you do not differentiate between what you hear and what you read when it comes to blogging how can you use different rules for them.

This is what the Merriam Webster Dictionary (2) has to say about the word -

"Don't is the earliest attested contraction of does not and until about 1900 was the standard spoken form in the United States (it survived as spoken standard longer in British English)." "It goes on to say that some surveys of attitudes toward usage show it more widely disapproved in 1971 than it had been 40 years earlier. Its chief use in edited prose is in fiction for purposes of characterization. It is sometimes used consciously, like ain't, to gain an informal effect."

So convinced and satisfied that for an informal publication forum such as The Eblogger website, I wasnt misleading my readers from thinking that I wanted to pass a contraction away as a whole word, I will now return to my desk and finish my jobs.

1. Language, Vol. 59, Number 3, Sept. 1983, 510-513
2 . don't. (2009). In Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary.
Retrieved February 10, 2009, from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/don't