It’s a powerhorse

Bill Goldberg, host of the History Channel’s “Forged in Fire” uttered this word blend malaphor when describing a particular sword.  This is a congruent conflation of “powerhouse” and “workhorse”, both describing a person or thing having great energy or strength.

Word blends are a subset of malaphors.  They are an unintentional blending of two or more words.  If you type word blend in the search engine on this blog or go to the index and scroll down to Word Blends you will see the many word blends I have posted.  Some examples are “Buckminster Abbey” (Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey and maybe Buckminster Fuller), and “blinched” (flinched and blinked).  The word blend malaphor is different than the portmanteau.  A portmanteau is an intentional blend of two words to create a new word with its own definition.  An example is smog (fog and smoke).  Word blend malaphors are simply mixed up words with no separate definition and are said unintentionally.  I hope you enjoyed my wordplay lesson of the day.

A big thank you to Anthony Kovacs for hearing this word blend and sending it in.