Laurie's portmanteau

National Review, March 23, 1998 by D. Keith Mano

Mr. Mano is a longtime contributor to NR.

'YOU just made that up out of blue air," my wife, Laurie Kennedy, said to me. Blue air, I thought, that's a gorgeous image. What my wife had done, she had taken "out of thin air" and overlapped it with "out of the blue" to make, well, something better. Quite unconsciously. When I brought this to her attention, she said, "Oh, you're so smart, you must figure you're the greatest thing since chopped bread."

Laurie, thank you so much, is not Mrs. Malaprop. Malapropisms occur when pretentious and stupid people affect a vocabulary that they haven't yet mastered. My wife, by contrast, is refurbishing the language day in and day out. When you hear Laurie say, "I worked like a troubadour," instead of "like a stevedore," you think, "Yes . . . I suppose writing and singing lyric poetry are hard jobs, never thought of it that way at all."

Nor is my wife just some commonplace Spooner. (You remember him, William Archibald Spooner, Anglican cleric and teacher, who said, "Let's have a cheer for the queer old dean," when Queen Victoria came to visit his college.) Compared with Laurie's subtle associative activity, Spoonerism is mere brain Nerf. In a Spoonerism the first letter (or syllable) of one word will be substituted for the first letter (or syllable) of another: "crushing blow" becomes a nonsensical "blushing crow." There is neither poetry nor improvement in it -- "crow" can tell you nothing about "blow," or "dean" about "queen." But when Laurie says, "Don't get my gander up," you see her anger (her dander) strutting around like a truculent old bird.

"Portmanteau word" is the technical term for what my wife gerrymanders in her mind. ("Chortle" is a long-accepted portmanteau word -- "chuckle" and "snort" blended together. So are "motel" and, more recently, "humongous.") Portmanteau words epitomize the inevitable movement toward more compressed and complex meaning that must occur in any healthy language. Laurie for instance has told me not to "incringe" on her space. This compound of "infringe" and "encroach" will become a useful intensifier once the world has been told about it. When in top form my wife can portmanteau whole phrases. So: "Get your goat" and "Bite the bait" turn into "Don't let them bite your goat."

Since I am a novelist and screenwriter, my associative mechanism is primarily visual: I note your pair of pliers on the green carpet and "see" some frog darting through pondwater scum. My wife -- a Tony-nominated actress -- has spent her life interpreting language. Her imaginative metabolism, therefore, is most often verbal. Talk about birth control and the law, and she will favor "tubal litigation." If you betray her, you "turn Redcoat." Insecure people have "kinks in their armor," and Jewish men are "circumscribed."

Since early childhood my wife's portmanteau has been full of nonce language like that. (A priest, she once said, put his "hassock on before celebrating Mass.") And thirty years' worth of theater has further shaped her cauliflower tongue. The rehearsal process, after all, is conducive to bizarre word affiliation. There are several categories of thinking involved. The conscious pattern (script) is dominant yet incomplete: cast members haven't fully memorized their text. To avoid calling the prompter for a line -- which would disrupt both emotional rhythm and technical business -- actors improvise. "I let my mind 'scat' in free association," Laurie told me. "I take the first words that will advance the rehearsal process, even if they're inexact. I suppose I do the same thing in life: I can't verbalize fast enough, can't remember my 'lines,' so I extemporize. I just take the bullet by the horns."

Metaphor-making is a subliminal enterprise. For both poet and scientist the breakthrough insight ("eureka moment") will unveil itself most readily where conscious thought has first been distracted by some trivial rumination. I, for example, play solitaire or random dice games while I write. These occupy my intellect in a superficial way -- and, during moments of inattention, the metaphor-loaded subconscious can surface. So dialogue in a play, like my dice and solitaire, will allow Laurie to "scat" through her subliminal mind while rehearsing -- and help create those peculiar locutions of the portmanteau.

Laurie is doing, in fact, what any decent poet would do: she takes worn-out language and reupholsters it with new verbal stuff. No cliche can escape her improving imagination. When angry she might say, "Don't get my shackles up." (And you feel the metal weight of her indignation.) Or, about the crocodile, "It had a gaping yaw." (Was deep and wide and also, apparently, yawed from side to side.) Some sculptor friend was doing "a bust of" Richard Nixon's head. An actor "looked good behind the camera." And she once saw policemen putting "cufflinks" on a mugger. (You now know why law enforcement has been so expensive.)

Laurie, possibly because she doesn't "hear" her strange verbal life as it is spoken aloud, remains somewhat distant from, if amused by, the phenomenon. I am more than that: I am amazed and made full of delight. Language evolves in my living room. "I guess," Laurie conceded, "I am a landmine for that kind of thing. Well, another milestone around my neck."