Snowmageddon

‘Snowmageddon’ is what Inside Science’s* presenter today called the very cold snap of freezing Siberian-wind-driven weather that we’re currently experiencing here in the UK.

Snow + Armageddon: meaning clearly, and instantly recognisably, some kind of ‘disaster by snow’, which is what is facing large areas of the snowbound UK tomorrow, with airports, roads, schools, and dozens of other types of businesses closed.

Why do we so love blending two words together? It seems to have become a real craze in recent years. ‘Brexit’ has got to be the most prominent new word-blend in our UK news and political discourse these days: Britain + exit (ie. from the European Union). I don’t remember so many new words being coined like this as I was growing up forty or so years ago... Or perhaps I just didn’t hear or read them, but they were always quietly being coined. For instance, new uses for old words like – well before my time – the making of a verb out of the noun ‘park’ (meaning a garden, but a static place for plants and pleasure, or the carefully cultivated area around a large country mansion or palatial house) and then appropriated for vehicles: we don’t think about ‘parking’ our cars these days, we just do it. And ‘parking’ as a noun has, it seems to me from my own observation when travelling or talking to people from a very wide range of other countries, become one of those many truly international English words, but usually used as a noun – many non-native speakers of English refer to ‘a parking’, as in, “We need to find a parking”: this use is still, it appears, non-standard English, but is widely used to mean either ‘a car-park / a parking lot’, or ‘a parking space’.

But these days new coinages are ‘out there’, worldwide at the touch of a button, so that’s maybe why I’m hearing so many day in, day out. And maybe it’s why so many coinages are occurring – it’s like a craze which has caught on and we’re all running with it. Well, whatever the reason, who cares? It’s as if we’ve seized the baton and we’re running with it: for the sheer exhilarating joy of language!

*Armageddon: an event of great destruction https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/armageddon

** BBC Radio 4 Inside Science 16.30, 01.03.2018

*** park Middle English: from Old French parc, from medieval Latin parricus, of Germanic origin: related to German Pferch ‘pen, fold’, also to paddock. The word was originally a legal term designating land held by royal grant for keeping game animals: this was enclosed and therefore distinct from a forest or chase and (also unlike a forest) had no special laws or foresters. A military sense ‘space occupied by artillery, wagons, stores etc in an encampment’ (late 17^th Century) is the origin of sense 2 of the noun (early 20^th century) ie. 2.‘an area devoted to a specific purpose’ e.g. 'business park'.   (Google 01.03.2018)