“I’m such a Foodo Dirkschneider I just HAD to have the brushed copper Kitchenaid mixer!”Everyone knows that portmanteaus are so much fun. You can take any two words, surgically slice them in half, then magically reattach them together into a verbal Frankenstein! Portmanteau technology has brought us so many wonderful wonders–words that, if they were missing from your vocabulary, would make you a very sorry sucker indeed! Words like manwich and spork and sexcapade and liger. Without portmanteaus, Blaxploitation would go unchecked, pulsars would cease to shine in the sky, blogs would not have been invented, and no one would ever again be able to chillax. Indeed, portmanteaus make life fantabulous.But as with all revolutionary technology, portmanteaus have a dark side: They can be twisted to mean extremely retarded things. Brangelina, funemployment, and fashionista are all terrible spelling experiments gone horribly wrong, the donor words cruelly vivisected and roughly stitched back together into a Human Centipede of literature.The food world has not been exempt from the ravages of rogue portmantism. In fact, the gastronomic sphere has been hammered particularly hard, due mostly to the fact that the food media is staffed by many, many, many douchebags. Here is a list of the top five worst portmanteaus about food:5. Foodtopia. The concept isn’t insulting in and of itself. After all, who wouldn’t want to live in a foodtopia, where the cows give chocolate milk, people sleep on marshmallow mattresses with Fruit Rollups for sheets at night, ducks are made of duck confit, and pigs are born already smoked? The problem is that the word has no flow: “food” buttresses painfully against “topia” like someone stubbing a bare toe on a kitchen cabinet. It’s got to be a better play on words than that. Like if you wanted to describe Israel as a “Jewtopia,” that would be acceptable. 4. Foodie.
Many, many, many windbags have complained about this word. I truthfully count myself among those windbags, but I am here today to put a stop to this madness right now, forever. And I will do it thusly, by declaring with force: NO ONE MAY EVER USE THE WORD FOODIE AGAIN! From here on out, “foodie” will be replaced with “Foodo Dirkschnieder,” and will be defined as a person who is as enthusiastic about cuisine as Accept frontman Udo Dirkschneider is about rocking out. For example, “Tom Colicchio is a god among Foodo Dirkschneiders.” 3. Fooderati. I don’t know if this is an actual thing or not, but I just want to include it on this list to pre-emptively make sure everyone knows that this word WOULD BE dumb, were it ever to enter the lexicon. 2. Foodgasm. This is just gross. Yes, I understand that you just had a sublime eating experience so pleasurable, you spontaneously ejaculated. But this word conjures up some pretty uncomfortable imagery of cheeseburgers squeezing their way through my cock and popping out of my urethra. The pickles and onions hurt the most. Either that, or you eat a REALLY GOOD hummus and end up prematurely “pea-jaculating.”1. Food Baby. It’s not technically a portmanteau, but this word is a heinous enough crime against the language that it TOPS THIS LIST. A food baby is the distended stomach you get after eating too much. But that doesn’t make sense. After all, when you’re pregnant, the “baby” is what comes out. So a food baby should really be another word for a turd. If you have a foodgasm, do you become pregnant with a food baby? But what if you aren’t ready for a food baby? How do you prevent it? Is bulimia the withdrawal method? Are lap- bands like condoms? An executive order issued by former President George W. Bush has instructed all educators that they must inform students that the ONLY way to avoid getting food pregnant with 100% effectiveness is anorexia. Please help us stop these evil foodmanteaus at once. If you hear a loved one using any of the words mentioned in this Top Five, please, please, make fun of them. Rating: 1 dumb lists out of 10
