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Portmanteau journalism is not a manual for writers, or a display of bravado or expertise. Instead, it draws on decades of my experience teaching undergraduates in a course shaped by The Economics Way of Thinking and Writing. The goal has always been to help students build a conceptual foundation for saying more with fewer words. This piece, adapted from a presentation I delivered at a Journalism Forum in 2024, is offered as a curated synopsis — one that may serve university students seeking to sharpen their analytical thinking and concise writing skills.

Language has always evolved to meet the communicative needs of the age — from oral traditions to print, radio, television, and now the digital age. With each leap in communication technology, language adapts to fit the medium’s demands. Today’s media ecosystem — dominated by scrolling thumbs, viral headlines, memes and shrinking attention spans — demands a new linguistic economy.

Writing a 1000-word article is not easy — especially when the topic involves multifaceted issues and dimensions. However, a useful strategy is splitting longer pieces into two articles of 800 to 1000 words instead of 1800-words long piece, benefiting readers by delivering focused insights. Still, keeping one coherent narrative has value, ensuring full exploration without fragmenting the reader’s experience. In my undergraduate Topics in Economics writing course, I always stressed the importance of writing economically — conveying maximum insight with minimum words, the very art of saying more with less.

In today’s fast-paced media landscape, capturing and holding a reader’s attention is more challenging than ever. Long articles risk losing audiences who skim or scroll past dense text. This is why portmanteau journalism has emerged as a powerful tool. At its core, it is the craft of saying more with less by compressing complex ideas into concise, memorable composite words that both inform and provoke. It’s not just clever writing, it’s survival writing. By coining new blends that name emerging phenomena, journalists provide conceptual shortcuts allowing readers to grasp layered realities swiftly and vividly. Paired with compelling visuals, these portmanteaus act as mental shortcuts, delivering rich meaning quickly and making content irresistible in a world craving immediacy and clarity.

The term portmanteau was coined by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass (1871), referring to a suitcase that opens into two equal parts. Carroll’s invention blended two words — like slimy and lithe into slithy — to create a new word inheriting meaning from both. This imaginative wordplay is no longer the exclusive domain of poets and novelists; it has become a journalistic necessity. Many familiar terms are portmanteaus — infotainment (information + entertainment), edutainment (education + entertainment), brunch (breakfast + lunch). But beyond familiar blends, portmanteau journalism thrives when writers coin new compounds to spotlight complex realities lacking succinct names.

Examples abound: Brexit (Britain + exit) compressed a multi-year political saga into a single sticky term; Reaganomics (Reagan + economics) defined an era of economic policy; doomscrolling (doom + scrolling) captures the compulsive consumption of bad news online. These terms are efficient, vivid and instantly evoke layers of backstory and implication. Once widely adopted, they not only describe but shape collective understanding.

Research confirms their power. Media studies show portmanteaus like doomscrolling and Brexit rapidly gain traction on social media, improving audience retention and comprehension by packaging complex ideas into memorable words (Pew Research Center, 2021; YouGov, 2020). The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism highlights portmanteaus as cognitive shortcuts helping audiences process dense political and social narratives amid overwhelming news flows. These findings confirm portmanteau journalism as a vital communicative tool for clarity and engagement.

A portmanteau is more than linguistic convenience, it’s a vessel of cultural consensus, allowing readers to carry a loaded suitcase of meaning without unpacking it each time. My recent articles in ¶¶Òõ¾«Æ· relied on a few original portmanteaus describing power and governance in Bangladesh: lootopoliticraft — the systemic orchestration of looting as political survival strategy; bureaupolitigraft — the entangled relationship of bureaucracy and politics lubricated by mutual corruption; kleptofascism — a fusion of authoritarian governance and elite theft; necropoliticraft — calculated exposure of populations to death or deprivation as control and profit; corrupticians (corruptician + politician); and geopoliticonomic (geopolitics + geoeconomics).

Each names phenomena to provoke recognition of structural rot behind euphemisms like ‘mismanagement’ or ‘policy failure.’ This style compresses accountability, piercing rhetorical fog to expose systemic abuse.

Today’s media consumers, especially digital natives — already speak this compressed language. The meme is their dialect: a portmanteau of image and idea, reference and reaction, capturing worldviews in seconds. Why should journalism lag?

Portmanteau journalism bridges this gap, speaking the language of the age with compression, velocity and wit. It proves clarity is not complexity’s enemy, but its sharpest tool.

In societies battling information overload, disinformation and narrative manipulation, precise, memorable naming is a public service. Well-forged portmanteaus become counter-weapons against propaganda, framing issues in terms the people can repeat, remember and resist with.

Academic disciplines use neologisms to collapse frameworks into digestible terms: gerrymandering, stagflation, glocalization. These words define and theorize. Similarly, portmanteau journalism performs portable theorizing — complex analyses migrate into public discourse.

Consider mansplaining (man + explaining) or sheeple (sheep + people). These verbal memes smuggle ideological critique inside humor or outrage. They survive not due to scholarly endorsement but because they stick like burrs, reframing the familiar. Portmanteaus serve as intellectual life-rafts, carrying ideas across disciplines, audiences and borders — from academia to activism, think tanks to TikTok.

Critics claim compression risks oversimplification or gimmickry and misuse. However, a strong portmanteau invites argument; it headlines a deeper story teaser for truth. Classical rhetoric calls this praegnans oratio — pregnant speech: saying more than is spoken. Today, such brevity is precision under pressure, and portmanteau is a prime instrument.

Dismissing portmanteau journalism as gimmickry ignores language’s evolution under stress. Shakespeare, Carroll, Orwell and political cartoonists invented words. Every crisis births new grammar.

Words don’t merely describe — they authorise. Naming frames engagement. Oppressive systems use euphemisms: slums become ‘informal settlements,’ police violence ‘law and order,’ looting ‘development.’ Portmanteau journalism strips these disguises.

When we say bureaupolitigraft, we diagnose a system, not isolated scandals. Lootopoliticraft points to deliberate blueprints, not accidents. Naming through portmanteaus is a democratic act, creating shared vocabulary for critique, resistance and reform. Thousands of stories compete for a swipe of attention. Journalism must evolve. Long-form still matters but needs linguistic hooks that survive the scroll. Portmanteau journalism offers that hook through elegant compression. A well-crafted portmanteau sparks cascades of meaning swiftly and memorably. However, a portmanteau is never the full story. It invites pause, unpacking, and exploration of the deeper ideas contained within its suitcase of words.

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Dr Abdullah A Dewan is a former physicist and nuclear engineer at BAEC and professor emeritus of economics at Eastern Michigan University, USA.