Spectator competition winners: unnatural combinations

The latest competition invited you to submit cringeworthy portmanteau words. The word portmanteau was first used in this sense by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass when Humpty Dumpty is explaining ‘Jabberwocky’ to Alice: ‘Well, “slithy” means “lithe and slimy”… You see it’s like a portmanteau — there are two meanings packed up into one word.’ There’s nothing wrong with new words, of course. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter of 1820 to John Adams: ‘I am a friend to neology. It is the only way to give to a language copiousness and euphony.’ The best, most enduring portmanteaus are witty, pithy and fill a gap (‘brunch’, ‘metrosexual’, ‘workaholic’). But the worst are forced, silly and impenetrable — masstige? Shanter? Nope, me neither — and, thanks to social media, they seem to be coming at us at an ever-increasing rate (‘We have, I think it’s fair to say,’ wrote Andy Bodle somewhat optimistically in the Guardian in February of last year, ‘reached peakmanteau.