Stormy McDaniels
Posted: August 23, 2018 Filed under: WORD BLENDS | Tags: humor, Karen McDougal, Larry Noble, malaphor, PBS Newshour, portmanteau, Stormy Daniels, Trump, words 2 CommentsLarry Noble, a campaign finance expert and former general counsel for the Federal Election Commission, uttered this word blend on the PBS News Hour last night. It is a mash up of Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, the two women who alleged to have affairs with Donald Trump before the 2016 election. Malaphors can be word blends as well as idiom blends, such as this one or Buckminster Palace, a blend of Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace (with perhaps a dash of Buckminster Fuller).
President Donald Trump listens as Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev speaks in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Malaphors 
“STORMY McDANIELS”
Come on Dave!
Have you no standards?
SORRY!
The purist in me requires a MALAPHOR to be a scramble of metaphors. This is a plain old garden-variety spoonerism.
Ralph, While I agree a malaphor is usually a blend of two or more idioms, it technically can also be a blend of two words (different than a portmanteau, which is a blend of two words to form a new word – ex. fog and smoke = smog). I have several examples of word blend malaphors on the website and in my book. A spoonerism is a verbal error in which a speaker accidentally transposes the initial sounds or letters of two or more words, such as “pinny gig” for guinea pig.
I don’t see Stormy McDaniels fitting that definition (probably she might not either!). Cheers, Dave