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Technologies are beginning to blend our experience of digital and physical realities. We exchange data (images, videos, messages, etc.), present ourselves to the rest of the world on social media, network, and even perform a larger number of tasks than in person. As our world and ways of life keep on changing, so do words. The aim of this article is to examine the coinage of blends (i.e. smog-type [<smoke + fog] words) as a response to the blended realities that have emerged from the use of new technologies.
Blended e-realities, blended words
The coinage of neologisms is, by no means, a new phenomenon in the history of the English language. Novel words demonstrate the productivity of any language while at the same time serve to attest to new realities and societal changes. Over the last decades, however, we are witnessing an unprecedented revolution led by the widespread use of electronic devices (mobile phones, tablets, laptops and netbooks, to name but a few), and the consolidation of the Internet as an indispensable global network which provides plentiful resources. This technological 'brave new world' has led speakers to search for ways to conceptualise new realities, which lately are characterised by being all-in-one devices: for instance, smartphones are progressively replacing single-purpose devices such as full cameras or GPS navigators.
This tendency towards hybrid technologies has been conspicuously reflected in recently coined words, many of which are 'blends' or combinations of two - or, more rarely, three - source words into one through 'simple concatenation or through concatenation coupled with overlap of shared phonological segments' (Kelly, 1998: 579). That is to say, the merger between words becomes apparent both in the form (or morphology) and meaning of the new blended lexical item. Some present-day epitomes of technological hybridity are phablet (<phone + tablet), vlog (<video + blog), adware (<advertisement + software), mactel (<Macintosh + Intel) or even machinima (<machine + cinema) 'an animated film created entirely on a computer and "filmed" using computer game technology or graphics software'.
One may wonder why blends have been - and still are - so popular in general language use and specific fields such as electronic devices or advancements....