My portmanteau is the word famdued. It is combination of the syllables "fam" from the word famished and "dued" from the term subdued. Famished is an adjective meaning extremely hungry or to go without food. Subdued is an adjective defining someone as quiet or controlled. Thus, the word I've improvised is an adjective describing a noun's attributes. In this case famdued means to be in a lethargic reserved state because of hunger. Its a pretty simple word to throw out in everyday conversation, but over a week of trying to make the word popular among my associates I realized it wouldn't be easily integrated into common speech.
After realizing my word was a flop I investigated why each individual didn't quite find the term desirable. Majority opinion was that it sounded to goofy. Famdued is accused of sounding like a mix between surfer culture words like dude with the idiom fam, short for family. Some people found the word unnecessary because its seemed redundant where they felt the term famished implied the same definition as my created word. To be accurate famished merely means a state of hunger and I interpret that doesn't mean an attitude when hungry. So the response to my addition to the English language was not promising.
Normally, since I consider myself rather creative when it comes to the mastery of diction I would be somewhat downtrodden with my failure of word craft. However, I find that the task is more difficult than it appears at first. If I were to work harder at the skill a portion of my terminologies might catch on.
No comments:
Post a Comment