ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses at greater length blends of the kind, which are like compounds in their make-up. They do not constitute an important kind of word-formation, in fact, compound-blends are rather rarely used, but it is interesting to notice the patterns on which they are formed and to compare them with the patterns of conventional compounds. And it is worth asking whether compound-blends as a class have anything in common apart from the formal characteristics, the morphological irregularities, by which we identify them; whether there are notions which they express more readily and appropriately than other kinds of complex word, and varieties of language in which they are especially likely to appear. Among the coordinative examples notices in the chapter are insinuendo, needcessity, boldacious, baffound, smothercate, all of which seem to have arisen in dialect or 'uneducated' speech. Many scholars have recognized only this presumably unintentional kind of blending, or as it is sometimes called, 'contamination'.
