On May 12th, 2010, xkcd featured a new comic named Malamanteau, showing a fictional Wikipedia-article named the same. The word malamanteau is itself a portmanteau and a malapropism, that is, it is a neologism created by combining two words in sound and meaning. Yet the word doesn't actually have a meaning in the English language.
Within a few hours the article was created on several Wikimedia-projects, including Wikipedia in various languages[1] [2] and Wiktionary[3]. Since malamanteau is purely artificial and does not have any occurrences other than xkcd prior to May 12th it was rejected by Wikipedian Administrators - debate still taking place.
Malamanteau has made it's way into several blogs and articles[4] [5], primarily because of its sudden impact on Wikipedia and the internet. For some hours during May 12th and 13th it was one of the most popular search terms on Google[citation needed].
Appears to have been coined at Metafilter in 2007: http://ask.metafilter.com/67192/How-to-define-this-language-mistake htom (talk) 23:32, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
- ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Malamanteau
- ^ http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Malamanteau&title=Spezial%3ALogbuch&type=delete&user=&page=Malamanteau
- ^ http://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=delete&page=Malamanteau
- ^ http://www.bbcnewsamerica.com/malamanteau-wikipedia.html
- ^ http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Malamanteau&defid=4957403