Portmanteau of the Day

grotendous /gr-tnds/, adjective, grotesque, horrendous. Used for extreme emphasis. Adverb: grotendously.

Cory Doctorow brought the adverb form to my attention with a posting on Boing Boing:

What’s weird to me is how the collective output of all that great work by great people produces such lousy outcomes — DRM-crippled OSes like Vista, stupid products like the Zune, grotendously complex apps like Office,

However, he points out that the adjective grotendous is “an old SoCal word”, and was used in the 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson:

it is not quite so grotendous, now that the loogie is off her face, but her hand is still perfectly immobilized.

The first use of the adjective on Usenet was in 1993:

Right on! Though he may beat out Branden (and his grotendous haircut) he still doesn’t outshine Dylan

The first known use of the adverb on the web was by Psyche on GreatestJournal:

Law Classes SUCK ASS. Massively. Grotendously. So badly that I have to reate entire WORDS to describe the atrocity.

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6 Responses to Portmanteau of the Day

  1. Grotendous is an old SoCal word. Neal Stephenson uses it in Snow Crash: “it is not quite so grotendous, now that the loogie is off her face, but her hand is still perfectly immobilized.”

  2. Eric says:

    Thanks for the correction, Cory! Despite Snow Crash being one of my favorite novels, and having read it multiple times, I did not recall the use of “grotendous”. I’ll have to read it again. :-)

    Google only turned up Psyche’s use of the word, though I didn’t really think you had necessarily found it there.

    Anyhow, it’s a great word, whatever the origin.

  3. Janusthorne says:

    The first time I encountered this word was in Mervyn Peake’s “The Gormenghast Trilogy”. Not sure exactly where but I remember failing to find it in any dictionaries at the time. It is one of only 4 words in the english language that end with the letters “endous”. It’s useful for stumping trivia buffs. The other words are of course tremendous, horrendous and stupendous. I have read Snow Crash a few times and don’t recall the word but I will look out for it the next time through.

  4. Tor says:

    “She has this image in her mind that he’s going to be like the wrestling coach at the high school. That would be so grotendous. Anyway that is where she is supposed to meet him” (Snow Crash, page 220).

  5. Janice says:

    “It is not quite so grotendous, now that the loogie is off her face, but her hand is still perfectly immobilized.” (Snow Crash, pp. 47)

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