Seacuterie

Salami of the sea

‘Seacuterie’ is a crime of a word. It looks OK in writing, if you don’t think about it too much, or if you’re the kind of person who approaches words like a scientist observing a new strain of bacillus. A linguistics student would point out that seacuterie is a portmanteau word, in which segments of multiple words are cut loose from their motherships and roped together into rafts of new meaning, producing such fantabulous and indispensable neologisms as ‘sheeple’ and ‘frenemies’. ‘Seacuterie,’ he’d tell you, is a portmanteau of ‘sea’ and ‘charcuterie.’ That’s all very well, but portmanteau or no portmanteau, ‘seacuterie’ sounds silly when you say it aloud.

seacuterie