STRANGE BUT TRUE
Q: You hear these blended words all the time ... “brunch” (“breakfast” + “lunch”), “motel” (“motor” + “hotel”), “podcast” (“iPod” + “broadcast”), but did you know there’s a name for them? “Portmanteau.” Can you identify the portmanteau here: “solunar,” “dripple,” “glocalize,” “judder,” and “masstige”?
A: “Solunar,” you probably guessed, combines “solar” and “lunar” and relates to the sun and the moon, says Anu Garg on his A.Word.A.Day website. “Dripple,” first used in 1821, blends “drip” and “dribble” and suggests flowing in a small stream or falling in drops. “Glocalize,” combining “global” and “localize,” means making a product or service widely available but adapted for local markets. For example, the “Jewish Post” (Israel) in 2012 wrote: “Communications have also been glocalized. Facebook, the global power on the rise, is an expression of this.”
“Judder,” meaning to shake or vibrate violently, blends “jolt, jar, jerk” and “shudder.” Finally, did you see that “masstige” combines “mass market” and “prestige” and thus means products that have the perception of luxury but are relatively affordable and marketed to the masses? As “The Gold Coast Bulletin” (Southport, Australia) used it in February, 2017: “... Treasury Wines had established its luxury and masstige wines in China to compete with French and Italian wines.”
Q: It was 1960 and Goodyear had designed prototypes of translucent illuminated tires that actually changed colors. Pretty neat. What colors were they?
A: Whatever color you wanted them to be, as they had the singular capability of matching the color the passengers happened to be wearing, reports Evan Ackerman in IEEE Spectrum magazine. Unfortunately, the tires never went into production because they “didn’t perform well in the rain and melted under heavy braking.” Today, Goodyear does make tires that match the color of your outfit, so long as you always wear black.