Brian Rogers Rogers Rabbits www.sunlive.co.nz

I can tell there's a lot of vexing questions on your mind, by the way you're squinting at this page.

That, or your undergarments are too tight. Assuming of course, you're wearing them. It just wouldn't be proper to be reading this without decent attire, unless you are Donald Duck who seems to have some sort of permanent Trouser Exemption. If you are Donald Duck and you are reading this without pants, please take a selfie and send it in. Our readers will be interested.

Several serious issues have been vexing the RR team this week, including the situation in Nepal, the situation with oil in our harbour, and the situation with the pending implosion of the Auckland housing bubble. However, one of the most troubling is the question, who invented the spork?

Was it accidental? Did a spoon maker go completely bonkers and put spikes on a spoon; or did a fork maker have a midlife crisis and inadvertently add a scoopy bit on the wrong piece of cutlery?

Perhaps the forklift from the fork factory collided with the spoon truck from the spoon factory (presumably at a fork in the road)? Should the question mark be there, or after ‘factory'?

And who decided it would be called a spork? Why wasn't it a foon? Our resident language geek tells us that words created from two, are called portmanteau words. The original refers to a piece of baggage, with two compartments. Blame the French.
Well, according to Wikipedia (possibly a portmanteau word itself) sporks are also known as foons.

'Spork-like utensils, such as the terrapin fork or ice cream fork, have been manufactured since the late 19th Century; patents for spork-like designs date back to at least 1874, and the word ‘spork' was registered as a trademark in the US and the UK decades later. They are used by fast food restaurants, schools, prisons, the military, backpackers and in airline meals.”

We can probably thank Samuel W. Francis, who was issued a US patent in 1874.
Harry L. McCoy also came up with a clever thing, a cutting spoon patented in 1908. Harry, as far as we know, didn't come up with a catchy name though. Some would say unless it's a spork, it's not the real McCoy.

And then there's a knork. Which Mr Wiki says is a hybrid form of cutlery which combines the cutting capability of a knife and the spearing capability of a fork into a single utensil. Roald Dahl writes that his father invented an early version of the knork, as a result of losing an arm. Horatio Nelson, minus an arm, also used a fork with a cutting edge, known as a Nelson fork.

I've seen some interesting knorks in my time, but none of them have been that pointy.

English boffins tell us the blended words are known as ‘portmanteau' which is combining two words to make a new one. I have no idea what portmanteau means but
you can blame Lewis Carroll, who first used in that context.

Then we got smog, a combo of smoke and fog, in case you didn't know. Followed by wurly, hair that is wavey and curly at the same time. Confused? Let me explain it over brunch.

Then there's a whole gaggle of company contrived labels. Such as Microsoft, and even the tradename Velcro, a combination of velour (velvet) and crochet (hook).

A ‘skort' is a mash up of skirt and shorts. Probably still not acceptable to Donald. However, he should be concerned about ‘turkducken', which was added to the Oxford Dictionary in 2010. It's a culinary masterpiece in which a chicken is inserted into a duck (take its pants off if necessary); and the duck into a turkey. You'll need a spork for that.

Then someone, probably trying to cover their backside, coined the phrase ‘guesstimate' and more recently our attempts to chill out and relax at the same time have resulted in a ‘chillax'.

Even celebrities have jumped on the portmanteau wagon, with merged name combos that have given us the cringeful Brangelina, TomKat and Beniffer.

I guess it won't be long before we see some new combinations, such as:
Dexting = Driving and texting. Apologies to Dexter.

Coffice = This week Hunter Wells brings us a story of a scientist/writer bloke who uses a local coffee shop has his office. He calls it the Coffice. (See page 16).

Please feel free to send in your ideas for new words. We'll publish them here first, so you'll be noted in the annals of history as the official inventor.

In the meantime, if I catch any of you dexting, I'm going to spork your eyes out.
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brian@thesun.co.nz