The portmanteau trap

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has a penchant for playing with words, was at it again recently. Inaugurating the 594 km-long Ganga Expressway in Shahjahanpur district, he said, “UP plus Yogi, bahut hai upyogi.”

This made me recall a few incidents where portmanteau could have caused havoc or would have had undesirable outcomes.

In Chandigarh in the mid-1970s, a few of us were recently married and were either expecting our first child or were proud parents of a newborn. The Kannadigas in Chandigarh from different professions, particularly from the Armed Forces, had formed a Kannada association. During the association’s meetings, one of the subjects discussed among parents and grandparents was the selection of a name for a newborn, or to-be-born babies.

The fashion then was to form a name by combining a syllable from the names of each one of the parents. For example, the son of Shantaram and Sushma was Sushant. If it were a girl child, it could be Shama. Similarly, the son of Prabhakar and Veena would be named Praveen.

It was at this time, that we, Vani and I, were blessed with a male child. Our friends suggested that we also use the same principle that they had successfully applied in naming their child and were very happy with the outcome.

I had to tell my friends very politely that, unfortunately, application of the same logic in naming our son would be disastrous. Our son, when he came back from his first school day, would have never pardoned us; had we not been careful, our child’s name would have turned out to be ‘Prani’, taking Pra from Prakash and ni from Vani.

Thankfully, Uday is happy that we did not fall prey to the ‘in thing’ prevalent at the time of his birth.

Years later, the discussion within our organisation was to pick an appropriate name for our in-house magazine. Since the organisation deals with construction projects, a name suggested was ‘yojana’ meaning projects. To further finetune and keep the name apt for the services we render it was suggested that we take Pra from my name (since I am the founder) and make it Prayojana, meaning useful both in Sanskrit and Kannada.

Thankfully, it occurred to me at the right time that a wag could pick up my initials also, which are ‘A N’ and prefix Prayojana and turn it to ‘anprayojana?’ meaning ‘of what use?’ A very dangerous name for an organisation rendering professional services!

We finally decided on another name. Since then, I am of the opinion that all portmanteau words don’t necessarily result in being pleasant and useful. I am not sure how useful Modi’s coinage would be in garnering votes in Uttar Pradesh elections but it would certainly have lifted the spirits of the doting crowds at Shahjahanpur.