The Independent
The Independent is a British online newspaper. Established in 1986 as a politically independent national morning newspaper published in London, it was controlled by Tony O'Reilly's Independent News & Media from 1997 until it was sold to Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev in 2010; the last printed edition of The Independent was published on Saturday 26 March 2016, leaving only its digital editions. Nicknamed the Indy, it began as a broadsheet, but changed to tabloid format in 2003; until September 2011, the paper described itself on the banner at the top of every newspaper as "free from party political bias, free from proprietorial influence". It tends to take a pro-market stance on economic issues; the daily edition was named National Newspaper of the Year at the 2004 British Press Awards. In June 2015, it had an average daily circulation of just below 58,000, 85 per cent down from its 1990 peak, while the Sunday edition had a circulation of just over 97,000. Launched in 1986, the first issue of The Independent was published on 7 October in broadsheet format.
It was produced by Newspaper Publishing plc and created by Andreas Whittam Smith, Stephen Glover and Matthew Symonds. All three partners were former journalists at The Daily Telegraph who had left the paper towards the end of Lord Hartwell's ownership. Marcus Sieff was the first chairman of Newspaper Publishing, Whittam Smith took control of the paper; the paper was created at a time of a fundamental change in British newspaper publishing. Rupert Murdoch was challenging long-accepted practices of the print unions and defeated them in the Wapping dispute. Production costs could be reduced which, it was said at the time, created openings for more competition; as a result of controversy around Murdoch's move to Wapping, the plant was having to function under siege from sacked print workers picketing outside. The Independent attracted some of the staff from the two Murdoch broadsheets who had chosen not to move to his company's new headquarters. Launched with the advertising slogan "It is. Are you?", challenging both The Guardian for centre-left readers and The Times as the newspaper of record, The Independent reached a circulation of over 400,000 by 1989.
Competing in a moribund market, The Independent sparked a general freshening of newspaper design as well as, within a few years, a price war in the market sector. When The Independent launched The Independent on Sunday in 1990, sales were less than anticipated due to the launch of the Sunday Correspondent four months prior, although this direct rival closed at the end of November 1990; some aspects of production merged with the main paper, although the Sunday paper retained a distinct editorial staff. In the 1990s, The Independent was faced with price cutting by the Murdoch titles, started an advertising campaign accusing The Times and The Daily Telegraph of reflecting the views of their proprietors, Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black, it featured spoofs of the other papers' mastheads with the words The Rupert Murdoch or The Conrad Black, with The Independent below the main title. Newspaper Publishing had financial problems. A number of other media companies were interested in the paper. Tony O'Reilly's media group and Mirror Group Newspapers had bought a stake of about a third each by mid-1994.
In March 1995, Newspaper Publishing was restructured with a rights issue, splitting the shareholding into O'Reilly's Independent News & Media, MGN, Prisa. In April 1996, there was another refinancing, in March 1998, O'Reilly bought the other shares of the company for £30 million, assumed the company's debt. Brendan Hopkins headed Independent News, Andrew Marr was appointed editor of The Independent, Rosie Boycott became editor of The Independent on Sunday. Marr introduced a dramatic if short-lived redesign which won critical favour but was a commercial failure as a result of a limited promotional budget. Marr admitted his changes had been a mistake in My Trade. Boycott left in April 1998 to join the Daily Express, Marr left in May 1998 becoming the BBC's political editor. Simon Kelner was appointed as the editor. By this time the circulation had fallen below 200,000. Independent News spent to increase circulation, the paper went through several redesigns. While circulation increased, it did not approach the level, achieved in 1989, or restore profitability.
Job cuts and financial controls reduced the quality of the product. Ivan Fallon, on the board since 1995 and a key figure at The Sunday Times, replaced Hopkins as head of Independent News & Media in July 2002. By mid-2004, the newspaper was losing £5 million per year. A gradual improvement meant. In November 2008, following further staff cuts, production was moved to Northcliffe House, in Kensington High Street, the headquarters of Associated Newspapers; the two newspaper groups' editorial and commercial operations remained separate, but they shared services including security, information technology and payroll. On 25 March 2010, Independent News & Media sold the newspaper to Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev for a nominal £1 fee and £9.25m over the next 10 months, choosing this option over closing The Independent and The Independent on Sunday, which would have cost £28m and £40m due to long-term contracts. In 2009, Lebedev had bought a controlling stake in the London Evening Standard. Two weeks editor Roger Alton resigned.
In July 2011, The Independent's columnist Johann Hari was stripped of the Orwell Prize he had won in 2008 after claims, to which Hari admitted, of plagiarism and inaccuracy. In January 2012, Chris Blackhurst
Extensive-form game
An extensive-form game is a specification of a game in game theory, allowing for the explicit representation of a number of key aspects, like the sequencing of players' possible moves, their choices at every decision point, the information each player has about the other player's moves when they make a decision, their payoffs for all possible game outcomes. Extensive-form games allow for the representation of incomplete information in the form of chance events modeled as "moves by nature"; some authors in introductory textbooks define the extensive-form game as being just a game tree with payoffs, add the other elements in subsequent chapters as refinements. Whereas the rest of this article follows this gentle approach with motivating examples, we present upfront the finite extensive-form games as constructed here; this general definition was introduced by Harold W. Kuhn in 1953, who extended an earlier definition of von Neumann from 1928. Following the presentation from Hart, an n-player extensive-form game thus consists of the following: A finite set of n players A rooted tree, called the game tree Each terminal node of the game tree has an n-tuple of payoffs, meaning there is one payoff for each player at the end of every possible play A partition of the non-terminal nodes of the game tree in n+1 subsets, one for each player, with a special subset for a fictitious player called Chance.
Each player's subset of nodes is referred to as the "nodes of the player". Each node of the Chance player has a probability distribution over its outgoing edges; each set of nodes of a rational player is further partitioned in information sets, which make certain choices indistinguishable for the player when making a move, in the sense that: there is a one-to-one correspondence between outgoing edges of any two nodes of the same information set—thus the set of all outgoing edges of an information set is partitioned in equivalence classes, each class representing a possible choice for a player's move at some point—, every path in the tree from the root to a terminal node can cross each information set at most once the complete description of the game specified by the above parameters is common knowledge among the playersA play is thus a path through the tree from the root to a terminal node. At any given non-terminal node belonging to Chance, an outgoing branch is chosen according to the probability distribution.
At any rational player's node, the player must choose one of the equivalence classes for the edges, which determines one outgoing edge except the player doesn't know which one is being followed. A pure strategy for a player thus consists of a selection—choosing one class of outgoing edges for every information set. In a game of perfect information, the information sets are singletons. It's less evident, it is assumed that each player has a von Neumann–Morgenstern utility function defined for every game outcome. The above presentation, while defining the mathematical structure over which the game is played, elides however the more technical discussion of formalizing statements about how the game is played like "a player cannot distinguish between nodes in the same information set when making a decision"; these can be made precise using epistemic modal logic. A perfect information two-player game over a game tree can be represented as an extensive form game with outcomes. Examples of such games include tic-tac-toe and infinite chess.
A game over an expectminimax tree, like that of backgammon, has no imperfect information but has moves of chance. For example, poker has both moves of imperfect information. A complete extensive-form representation specifies: the players of a game for every player every opportunity they have to move what each player can do at each of their moves what each player knows for every move the payoffs received by every player for every possible combination of moves The game on the right has two players: 1 and 2; the numbers by every non-terminal node indicate. The numbers by every terminal node represent the payoffs to the players; the labels by every edge of the graph are the name of the action. The initial node belongs to player 1. Play according to the tree is as follows: player 1 chooses between U and D; the payoffs are as specified in the tree. There are four outcomes represented by the four terminal nodes of the tree:, and; the payoffs associated with each outcome are as follows, and. If player 1 plays D, player 2 will play U' to maximise their payoff and so player 1 will only receive 1.
However, if player 1 plays U, player 2 maximises their payoff by playing D' and player 1 receives 2. Player 1 prefers 2 to 1 and s
Groupe PSA
Groupe PSA is a French multinational manufacturer of automobiles and motorcycles sold under the Peugeot, Citroën, DS, Opel and Vauxhall brands. Peugeot is the largest PSA brand in the world. PSA is listed on the Euronext Paris stock exchange and is again a constituent of the CAC 40 index after having been removed in 2012. Beginning in 2016, PSA began to outline a strategy which entailed the rapid expansion of the company, through both geographic expansion and acquisitions of other car companies. PSA has announced plans to enter the Indian, Canadian, ASEAN, other markets in the coming years. Headquartered in Rueil-Malmaison, PSA, with sales of 3.78 million units, was in 2018 the second-largest Europe-based automaker. In December 1974 Peugeot S. A. acquired a 38.2% share of Citroën. On 9 April 1976 they increased their stake of the bankrupt company to 89.95%, thus creating the PSA Group, becoming PSA Peugeot Citroën. Since Citroën had two successful new designs in the market at this time and Peugeot was prudent in its own finances, the PSA venture was a financial success from 1976 to 1979.
In late 1978, PSA purchased the failing Chrysler Europe from the troubled US parent firm for a nominal US$1.00, plus assumption of outstanding debt, leading to losses for the consortium from 1980 to 1985. Further investment was required because PSA decided to create a new brand for the entity for the disparate French and British models, based on the Talbot sports car last seen in the 1950s. From on, the whole Chrysler/Simca range was sold under the Talbot badge until production of Talbot-branded passenger cars was shelved in 1987 and on commercial vehicles in 1992. All of this investment caused serious financial problems for the entire PSA group. In 1987, the company dropped the Talbot brand for passenger cars when it ceased production of the Simca-developed Horizon. What was to have been the Talbot Arizona became the Peugeot 309, with the former Rootes plant in Ryton and Simca plant in Poissy being turned over for Peugeot assembly from October 1985. Producing Peugeots in Ryton was significant, as it signaled the first time that PSA would build cars in the UK.
The Talbot name survived for a little longer on commercial vehicles until 1992 before being shelved completely. From 1987 to 1995, the Ryton plant produced the Peugeot 405 saloon. On 29 February 2012, PSA announced the creation of a major alliance with General Motors, as part of which GM became PSA's second-largest shareholder, after the Peugeot family, with a holding of 7%; the alliance was intended to enable $2 billion per year of cost savings through platform sharing, common purchasing and other economies of scale. In July 2012, a union official said that PSA Peugeot Citroën would cut as much as 10 percent of its French workforce of 100,356 employees on permanent and temporary contract; the jobs cut was more than announced. On 24 October, PSA said it was close to an agreement with creditor banks on €11.5 billion of refinancing and had won state guarantees on €7 billion in further borrowing by its Banque PSA Finance. CEO Philippe Varin says that "Citroën and Peugeot are too close", so he plans on positioning Citroën C-line models lower than Peugeot with DS models above Peugeot.
On 12 December 2013, General Motors announced it was selling its 7% stake in PSA Peugeot Citroën to the multibillion-dollar Padmapriya Automobile Investment Group. In 2014, Dongfeng Motor Group, the Chinese partner that builds PSA cars in China, the French government each took a 13% stake in PSA, in a financial rescue operation, reducing the Peugeot family share from 25% to 14%. Following Dongfeng and the French government each acquiring stakes in Groupe PSA, various cost-cutting measures at the company turned its fortune around and reduced PSA's debt, until the company began to turn a profit beginning in 2015. A new CEO, Carlos Tavares, was engaged and began to implement various cost-cutting measures and expanded the model range of all three core brands, alongside the creation of a new brand, DS Automobiles. In early 2016, PSA unveiled a roadmap detailing its plan to re-enter the North American car market for the first time since 1991. Although many only expected the DS to enter the North American market, PSA announced that all of its brands would be sold across the continent.
The plan to re-enter the market has three-stages, be a partner in a transportation network company begin renting and sharing PSA's own vehicles to the public several years after, followed by a full launch, establishing a dealer network in 2020. On 10 February 2017, PSA announced a 50:50 joint venture with the C. K. Birla Group the owner of the Hindustan Motors to sell Peugeot, Citröen, DS vehicles in India and purchase of the Ambassador brand from Hindustan Motors at the cost of INR 80 Crore; this marks the first time in over twenty years. On 14 February 2017 PSA announced that it was in talks to acquire Opel and Vauxhall Motors from General Motors; the talks were in an advanced stage, but were a surprise to the press and to much of Opel's leadership as they had plans to transform the company into an electric-car-only brand using the platform of the Opel Ampera-e for a wide range of models. GM agreed to continue to supply PSA with other electric vehicle technology. GM reported a loss of US$257 million from its European operations on 2016, sixt
For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology
For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology is an international youth organization that operates the FIRST Robotics Competition, FIRST LEGO League, FIRST Lego League Jr. and FIRST Tech Challenge competitions. Founded by Dean Kamen and Woodie Flowers in 1989, its expressed goal is to develop ways to inspire students in engineering and technology fields, its philosophy is expressed by the organization as coopertition and gracious professionalism. FIRST operates FIRST Place, a research facility at FIRST headquarters in Manchester, New Hampshire, where it holds educational programs and day camps for students and teachers. FIRST operates as a non-profit public charity corporation, it licenses qualified teams affiliated with schools or other youth organizations, to participate in its competitions. The teams in turn pay a fee to FIRST; the supreme body of FIRST is its board of directors, which includes corporate executives and former government officials. FIRST has an executive advisory board and several senior advisors.
Day-to-day operations are run by a senior management team, consisting of a president and five vice presidents. The first and highest-scale program developed through FIRST is the FIRST Robotics Competition, designed to inspire high school students to become engineers by giving them real world experience working with engineers to develop a robot; the inaugural FIRST Robotics Competition was held in 1992 in the Manchester Memorial High School gymnasium. As of 2019, over 3,700 high school teams totaling over 46,000 students from Australia, Canada, Turkey, Mexico, the Netherlands, the United States, the United Kingdom, more compete in the annual competition, with more than 7500 teams in existence; the competition challenge changes each year, the teams can only reuse certain components from previous years. The robots weigh at most 125 pounds, without bumpers; the kit issued to each team contains a base set of parts. Registration and the kit of parts together cost about US$6,000. In addition to that, teams are allowed to spend another $3,500 on their robot.
The purpose of this rule is to lessen the influence of money on teams' competitiveness. Details of the game have been released on the first Saturday in January, the teams have been given six weeks to construct a robot that can accomplish the game's tasks. In 2011, teams participated in 48 regional and district competitions throughout March in an effort to qualify for the FIRST Championship in St. Louis in April. Previous years' Championships have been held in Atlanta, Houston, Texas and at Walt Disney World's Epcot. On October 7, 2009, FIRST announced that the Championship Event will be held in St. Louis, Missouri for 2011 through 2013; each year the FIRST Robotics Competition has scholarships for the participants in the program. In 2011, there were over $14 million worth of scholarships from more than 128 colleges and universities and corporations; the district competition system was introduced in Michigan and as of 2017 has expanded to include districts in the Pacific Northwest, the Mid-Atlantic, the Washington DC area, New England, North Carolina and Israel.
When they were created in 2017, the Ontario and Israel districts became the first districts outside of the United States. The district competition system changed the traditional "regional" events by allowing teams to compete in multiple smaller events and using an associated ranking algorithm to determine which teams would advance to the next level of the competition. In general, there have been pushes to move more regions to the districts system; the FIRST Tech Challenge FIRST Vex Challenge, is a mid-level robotics competition announced by FIRST on March 22, 2005. According to FIRST, this competition was designed to be a more accessible and affordable option for schools. FIRST has said that the FTC program was created for those of an intermediate skill level. FIRST Tech Challenge robots are one-third the scale of their FRC counterparts; the FTC competition is meant to provide a transition for students from the FLL competition to the FRC competition. FTC was developed for the Vex Robotics Design System, available commercially.
The 2005 FVC pilot season featured a demonstration of the FIRST Vex Challenge using a 1/3 linear scale mock-up of the 2004 FRC Competition, FIRST Frenzy: Raising the Bar. For their 2005-2006 Pilot Season, FVC teams played the Half-Pipe Hustle game using racquet balls and ramps. For the 2006-2007 FTC Season, the FIRST Tech Challenge teams competed in the Hangin'-A-Round challenge using softballs, rotating platforms, a hanging bar, a larger'Atlas' ball, larger than most Vex robots and harder to manipulate. Competitions were held around the United States and Mexico. For the 2008-2009 FTC season, a new kit was introduced, as FIRST moved away from the VEX platform and worked with several different vendors to create a custom kit and control system for FTC known as Tetrix. Based around the LEGO Mindstorms NXT "brain" and including secondary specialized controllers to overcome the limitations of the NXT, teams use a Bluetooth link between the NXT and a laptop running FTC driver station software. A team's drivers use either one or two USB gamepads to control their robots.
For the 2015-2016 FTC season, in a partnership with Qualc
John Forbes Nash Jr.
John Forbes Nash Jr. was an American mathematician who made fundamental contributions to game theory, differential geometry, the study of partial differential equations. Nash's work has provided insight into the factors that govern chance and decision-making inside complex systems found in everyday life, his theories are used in economics. Serving as a Senior Research Mathematician at Princeton University during the part of his life, he shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with game theorists Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi. In 2015, he shared the Abel Prize with Louis Nirenberg for his work on nonlinear partial differential equations. John Nash is the only person to be awarded both the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and the Abel Prize. In 1959, Nash began showing clear signs of mental illness, spent several years at psychiatric hospitals being treated for paranoid schizophrenia. After 1970, his condition improved, allowing him to return to academic work by the mid-1980s.
His struggles with his illness and his recovery became the basis for Sylvia Nasar's biography, A Beautiful Mind, as well as a film of the same name starring Russell Crowe as Nash. On May 23, 2015, Nash and his wife Alicia were killed in a car crash while riding in a taxi on the New Jersey Turnpike, he is survived by John Charles Martin Nash and John Stier. Nash was born on June 1928, in Bluefield, West Virginia, his father, John Forbes Nash, was an electrical engineer for the Appalachian Electric Power Company. His mother, Margaret Virginia Nash, had been a schoolteacher, he was baptized in the Episcopal Church. He had Martha. Nash attended kindergarten and public school, he learned from books provided by his parents and grandparents. Nash's parents pursued opportunities to supplement their son's education, arranged for him to take advanced mathematics courses at a local community college during his final year of high school, he attended Carnegie Institute of Technology through a full benefit of the George Westinghouse Scholarship majoring in chemical engineering.
He switched to a chemistry major and at the advice of his teacher John Lighton Synge, to mathematics. After graduating in 1948 with both a B. S. and M. S. in mathematics, Nash accepted a scholarship to Princeton University, where he pursued further graduate studies in mathematics. Nash's adviser and former Carnegie professor Richard Duffin wrote a letter of recommendation for Nash's entrance to Princeton stating, "He is a mathematical genius." Nash was accepted at Harvard University. However, the chairman of the mathematics department at Princeton, Solomon Lefschetz, offered him the John S. Kennedy fellowship, convincing Nash that Princeton valued him more. Further, he considered Princeton more favorably because of its proximity to his family in Bluefield. At Princeton, he began work on his equilibrium theory known as the Nash equilibrium. Nash earned a Ph. D. degree in 1950 with a 28-page dissertation on non-cooperative games. The thesis, written under the supervision of doctoral advisor Albert W. Tucker, contained the definition and properties of the Nash equilibrium, a crucial concept in non-cooperative games.
It won Nash the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1994. Publications authored by Nash relating to the concept are in the following papers: Nash, John Forbes. "Equilibrium Points in N-person Games". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 36: 48–49. Doi:10.1073/pnas.36.1.48. MR 0031701. PMC 1063129. PMID 16588946. Nash, John Forbes. "The Bargaining Problem". Econometrica. Basel, Switzerland: MDPI. 18: 155–62. Doi:10.2307/1907266. JSTOR 1907266. MR 0035977. Nash, John Forbes. "Non-cooperative Games". Annals of Mathematics. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University. 54: 286–95. Doi:10.2307/1969529. JSTOR 1969529. MR 0043432. Nash, John Forbes. "Two-person Cooperative Games". Econometrica. Basel, Switzerland: MDPI. 21: 128–40. Doi:10.2307/1906951. MR 0053471. Archived from the original on March 29, 2017. Retrieved January 4, 2017. Nash did groundbreaking work in the area of real algebraic geometry: John Forbes. "Real algebraic manifolds". Annals of Mathematics. 56: 405–21.
Doi:10.2307/1969649. JSTOR 1969649. MR 0050928. See "Proc. Internat. Congr. Math". AMS. 1952: 516–17. His work in mathematics includes the Nash embedding theorem, which shows that every abstract Riemannian manifold can be isometrically realized as a submanifold of Euclidean space, he made significant contributions to the theory of nonlinear parabolic partial differential equations and to singularity theory. Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov writes about Nash's work: Nash was solving classical mathematical problems, difficult problems, something that nobody else was able to do, not to imagine how to do it.... But what Nash discovered in the course of his constructions of isometric embeddings is far from'classical' — it is something that brings about a dramatic alteration of our understanding of the basic logic of analysis and differential geometry. Judging from the classical perspective, what Nash has achieved in his papers is as impossible as the story of his life... is work on isometric immersions... opened a new world of mathematics that stretches in front of our eyes in yet unknown directions and still waits to be explored.
John Milnor gives a list of 21 publications. In the Nash biography A Beautiful Mind, author Sylvia Nasar explains that Nash was working on proving Hilbert's nineteenth problem, a theorem involving elliptic partial differential equ
Frenemy
"Frenemy" is an oxymoron and a portmanteau of "friend" and "enemy" that refers to "a person with whom one is friendly, despite a fundamental dislike or rivalry" or "a person who combines the characteristics of a friend and an enemy". The term is used to describe personal and commercial relationships both among individuals and groups or institutions; this term describes a competitive friendship. The word originates from the aristocratic Mitford sisters, of social fame; the American-based author and activist Jessica Mitford who circulated it, stated it was: "an useful word…coined by one of my sisters when she was a small child to describe a rather dull little girl who lived near us. My sister and the Frenemy played together constantly…all the time disliking each other heartily. "Frenemy" has appeared in print as early as 1953 in an article titled "Howz about calling the Russians our Frienemies?" by the American gossip columnist Walter Winchel in the Nevada State Journal. It underwent a massive hike in usage, beginning in 1996, with the hike's roots being as early as 1970.
A Businessweek article stated that frenemies in the workplace are common in business to business partnerships. Due to informal environments and the "abundance of close, intertwined relationships that bridge people's professional and personal lives... it wasn't unheard of for people to socialize with colleagues in the past, the sheer amount of time that people spend at work now has left a lot of people with less time and inclination to develop friendships outside of the office." Professional relationships are successful when two or more business partners come together and benefit from one another, but personal relationships require more common interests outside of business. Relationships in the workplace, or any place that involves performance comparing form because of the commonalities between persons. Due to the intense environment competitiveness evolves into envy and strains the relationships. Frenemy type relationships become routine and common because of the shared interest of business dealings or competition.
Sigmund Freud said of himself that “an intimate friend and a hated enemy have always been indispensable to my emotional life...not infrequently…friend and enemy have coincided in the same person”. Competition The enemy of my enemy is my friend Promoting adversaries Love-hate relationship Sir Martin Sorrell discusses media changes LA Times: Google an ally, not a threat, media exec says The Word - Apocalypse Mao: Murdered by the Orient's Success - Frenemy
Portmanteau
A portmanteau or portmanteau word is a linguistic blend of words, in which parts of multiple words or their phones are combined into a new word, as in smog, coined by blending smoke and fog, or motel, from motor and hotel. In linguistics, a portmanteau is defined as a single morph; the definition overlaps with the grammatical term contraction, but contractions are formed from words that would otherwise appear together in sequence, such as do and not to make don't, whereas a portmanteau word is formed by combining two or more existing words that all relate to a singular concept. A portmanteau differs from a compound, which does not involve the truncation of parts of the stems of the blended words. For instance, starfish is not a portmanteau, of star and fish; the word portmanteau was first used in this sense by Lewis Carroll in the book Through the Looking-Glass, in which Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the coinage of the unusual words in "Jabberwocky", where slithy means "slimy and lithe" and mimsy is "miserable and flimsy".
Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the practice of combining words in various ways: You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word. In his introduction to The Hunting of the Snark, Carroll uses portmanteau when discussing lexical selection: Humpty Dumpty's theory, of two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau, seems to me the right explanation for all. For instance, take the two words "fuming" and "furious." Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first … if you have the rarest of gifts, a balanced mind, you will say "frumious." In then-contemporary English, a portmanteau was a suitcase. The etymology of the word is the French porte-manteau, from porter, "to carry", manteau, "cloak". In modern French, a porte-manteau is a clothes valet, a coat-tree or similar article of furniture for hanging up jackets, hats and the like. An occasional synonym for "portmanteau word" is frankenword, an autological word exemplifying the phenomenon it describes, blending "Frankenstein" and "word".
Many neologisms are examples of blends. In Punch in 1896, the word brunch was introduced as a "portmanteau word." In 1964, the newly independent African republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar chose the portmanteau word Tanzania as its name. Eurasia is a portmanteau of Europe and Asia; some city names are portmanteaus of the border regions they straddle: Texarkana spreads across the Texas-Arkansas border, while Calexico and Mexicali are the American and Mexican sides of a single conurbation. A scientific example is a liger, a cross between a male lion and a female tiger. Many company or brand names are portmanteaus, including Microsoft, a portmanteau of microcomputer and software. "Jeoportmanteau!" is a recurring category on the American television quiz show Jeopardy!. The category's name is itself a portmanteau of the words "Jeopardy" and "portmanteau." Responses in the category are portmanteaus constructed by fitting two words together. Portmanteau words may be produced by joining together proper nouns with common nouns, such as "gerrymandering", which refers to the scheme of Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry for politically contrived redistricting.
The term gerrymander has itself contributed to portmanteau terms playmander. Oxbridge is a common portmanteau for the UK's two oldest universities, those of Oxford and Cambridge. In 2016, Britain's planned exit from the European Union became known as "Brexit". David Beckham's English mansion Rowneybury House was nicknamed "Beckingham Palace", a portmanteau of his surname and Buckingham Palace. Many portmanteau words do not appear in all dictionaries. For example, a spork is an eating utensil, a combination of a spoon and a fork, a skort is an item of clothing, part skirt, part shorts. On the other hand, turducken, a dish made by inserting a chicken into a duck, the duck into a turkey, was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2010; the word refudiate was first used by Sarah Palin when she misspoke, conflating the words refute and repudiate. Though a gaffe, the word was recognized as the New Oxford American Dictionary's "Word of the Year" in 2010; the business lexicon is replete with newly coined portmanteau words like "permalance", "advertainment", "advertorial", "infotainment", "infomercial".
A company name may be portmanteau as well as a product name. Two proper names can be used in creating a portmanteau word in r
