Muslimentalist

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In today's Zippy, Bill Griffith is on top of coining:

I'm surprised there aren't more hits for Muslimentalist as a telescoping of Muslim fundamentalist. I've found only two (and none at all for Muslimentalism). From the blog Ain't It Cool News, from the commenter Roguewriter on 17 July 2006:

… right up until some cheerful, misguided Muslimentalist walks into a crowded downtown movie house and spritzes the patrons with some deadly retrovirus, which is spread to thousands in mere hours.

And on benperry.net this February:

After Fox News leapt eagerly onto fabricated reports of the young Barack Obama’s supposed Muslimentalist education (turns out his elementary school even had a painting of Jesus on the wall), Washington Post blogger The Sleuth has now learned that Obama’s crew is “freezing out” reporters from Fox News …

The second example has Muslimentalist as a fairly straightforward substitute for Muslim fundamentalist, but the first seems to convey something more like 'Muslim terrorist', which (with its move from fundamentalist to terrorist) is something of a stretch. (Seeing no way to prevent these examples from leading people to start a political discussion in the comments section, I am disabling comments on this posting.)

[A note on the term telescoping above. Muslimentalist is a combination of two words, and indeed an intentional combination, not an inadvertent error (though there are plenty of blending slips of the tongue to be found). There are several types of such intentional combinations, including portmanteaus (like Lewis Carroll's slithy, a combination of slimy and lithe), in which two words that are alternatives for some slot are combined formally so as to convey the combination of their meanings ('both slimy and lithe'), and telescopings, in which a two-word phrase is formally compacted, with the beginning of the first word contributing the initial part of the result and the end of the second word contributing the final part.]

 



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