You're right, I shouldn't have said "rarely" -- thanks for helping me learn! You, also, shouldn't have said the first word is "usually" included. With help from an LLM and python looking at the 86 common portmanteaus, I found that the numbers are:
count percent
both 5 6.4
first word only 29 24.4 (you said "usually," I said "rarely")
neither 39 50.0
second word only 25 19.2
By the way, I called the code "portmantotal.py" :-)
Cyborg was not opaque to me, because I grew up reading science fiction so was very familiar with the concept of the cybernetic organism. My parents explained the origin of "velcro" to me when I was a kid and thought it was cool that it had two sides.
EDIT: While playing with the data in python, I realized that chatgpt included 8 duplicates in the above list originally. I will fix that and recalculate the numbers.
Also, I was thinking about compound words, like seatbelt, schoolbus, butterfly and marshmallow, where all of both words is included -- I don't consider those portmanteaus. And yet, the "both" category in my list is interesting: "covidiot" works because the words overlap, and "blogosphere" adds an extra letter. "Manspread," in my opinion, is also a portmanteau but it's hard to explain why I wouldn't just call it a "compound word" . Probably either because it's derived from "mansplain" or because it adds a noun to a verb whereas compound words are usually noun + noun.
By the way, I called the code "portmantotal.py" :-)
Cyborg was not opaque to me, because I grew up reading science fiction so was very familiar with the concept of the cybernetic organism. My parents explained the origin of "velcro" to me when I was a kid and thought it was cool that it had two sides.
EDIT: While playing with the data in python, I realized that chatgpt included 8 duplicates in the above list originally. I will fix that and recalculate the numbers.
Also, I was thinking about compound words, like seatbelt, schoolbus, butterfly and marshmallow, where all of both words is included -- I don't consider those portmanteaus. And yet, the "both" category in my list is interesting: "covidiot" works because the words overlap, and "blogosphere" adds an extra letter. "Manspread," in my opinion, is also a portmanteau but it's hard to explain why I wouldn't just call it a "compound word" . Probably either because it's derived from "mansplain" or because it adds a noun to a verb whereas compound words are usually noun + noun.