compounds - Term for words like Snowmageddon, Nipplegate and even cheeseburger?


Is there a term for words like Snowmageddon, Nipplegate and even cheeseburger?


I know they're portmanteaus (or portmanteaux), but they seem to belong to a special class of portmanteau.


In the title examples, Armageddon, Watergate and hamburger seem to be the "mother" terms respectively (more so than snow, nipple, and cheese), and the derived terms Snowmageddon, Nipplegate and cheeseburger seem to be child terms in the sense that each clearly alludes to its mother term and could conceivably have sibling terms like Floodmageddon, Lewinskygate, and chiliburger.


Actually, the more I thought about examples of this phenomenon, the more I came up with examples that fit the description but weren't strictly portmanteaus. One might be "Rat Pack", which gets referenced by "Brat Pack" and "Frat Pack". Idk, maybe I'm getting too inclusive.


Is anyone familiar with a term for this or has seen a list of them? I love lists.



Answer



This sort of portmanteau is closely related to the phrasal templates called snowclones:



Snowclone is a neologism for a type of cliché and phrasal template originally defined as “a multi-use, customizable, instantly recognizable, time-worn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different variants.”


An example of a snowclone is the phrase “grey is the new black,” which gave rise to the template “X is the new Y.” X and Y may be replaced with different words or phrases—for example, “comedy is the new rock ’n’ roll.”



You could probably call such a word a snowclone and be understood, although if you want to emphasize that it's a single word, you could call it a “snowclone word” or “snowclone portmanteau.”


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