By Kori Waring
June 16th was Bloomsday, the only internationally celebrated holiday honoring one particular work of art: James Joyce’s Ulysses. One hundred and ten years to the day after Joyce’s novel takes place, literary nerds of a certain breed congregated in cities across the world to dress up like this:
And do things like this:
And eat this for lunch:
gorgonzola sandwich, burgundy
In belated celebration of Bloomsday, I want to share a list I compiled—in a totally normal, non-obsessive way—of portmanteau words (i.e. words made by combining two or more words) that James Joyce invented for the third chapter of Ulysses (“Proteus”). For equally normal, non-obsessive reasons, I’ve organized them not alphabetically, but by parts of speech, and can tell you that of the sixty-four invented portmanteaux I counted, 55% are adjectives, 39% are nouns, 3% are verbs, and 3% are adverbs. Also, because there were so many adjectives, I broke those down by their constituent parts of speech too. Y’know. Like you do.
Adjectives:
(noun+participle) noun:
“…strandentwining cable of all flesh”
“…whiteheaped corn”
“…whitemaned seahorses”
“…skeweyed Walter”
“…chalkscrawled backdoors”
“…bloodbeaked prows”
“…peacocktwittering lashes”
“…milkoozing fruits”
“…fourworded wavespeech”
“…allwombing tomb”
(noun+adjective) noun:
“…hundredheaded rabble”
“…froggreen wormwood”
“…saucestained plates”
“…gumheavy serpentplants”
“…windraw face”
(adjective/adverb+participle) noun:
“…lowskimming gull”
“…seawardpointed ears”
“…longlashed eyes”
(verb+adverb) noun
“…pushedback chairs”
“…turnedup trousers”
(noun+noun) noun:
“…whiterose ivory”
noun+adjective:
snotgreen
bluesilver
basiliskeyed
saltwhite
saltblue
noun+participle:
redpanting
moondrawn
horsenostrilled
ghostcandled
adjective+participle:
sanguineflowered
myriadislanded
adjective+adjective:
allbright
3+ word adjectives:
brightwindbridled
shellcocoacoloured
Nouns:
seaspawn
seawrack
ghostwoman
contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality
razorshells
facebones
stoneheaps
whalemeat
lacefringe
wavenoise
dogskull
dogsniff
monkwords
marybeads
roguewords
manshape
serpentplants
wavespeech
foampool
corpsegas
seachange
seadeath
creamfruit
abstrusiosities
shellgrit
Verbs:
bigdrumming
loudlatinlaughing
Adverbs:
duskward
greengoldenly
Do I have opinions about the effect these words create in “Proteus”? I do. Would those opinions take up more space than is reasonable for a blog post? They would. You don’t need me, though. Read Ulysses and decide for yourself. It has a reputation for being a tough read, and it’s true that you have to be willing to let some allusions fly over your head, but mostly Ulysses requires one thing: forget everything you know about reading fiction, and let the book teach you how to read it. I promise it’s worth the effort. James Joyce will blow your mind.
I’ll end with a quote. Stephen Dedalus thinks this in a self-deprecating way in “Proteus,” but I think in an odd, Joycean way it does a pretty good job of capturing why we read literature, and certainly why you should read Ulysses:
“When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once…”
Yes.
Happy Bloomsday, internet.