John Timpane, “A Linguistic Blizzard for All These Snowstorms” (Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 9, 2011).
Ben Zimmer is the “On Language” columnist for the New York Times Magazine and executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com websites. He writes by e-mail that words such as snowmageddon are portmanteau words, in which two words are joined cleverly together. In the case of weather words, “a weather term is playfully grafted with another word segment for purposes of emphasis or exaggeration.” He says snow talk can get “ludicrously melodramatic” when “snowstorms are likened to apocalyptic end times.” And he allows as how he’s feeling a little “snowmanteau fatigue.”
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