I am probably on the autism spectrum. I have never been diagnosed as such, but I do exhibit some of the symptoms. Small talk has little appeal for me, and I often deal with it by changing the subject to something vulgar. And since I have difficulty picking up nonverbal cues, I am often oblivious to the displeasure of others when I do so.

One would think that school psychologists and counselors would have labeled me as a tizzums boy. I guess it was not the rubber stamp de jour back then. Instead, they said I was a “deviant thinker.” I am not sure what that was supposed to mean exactly. All I know was that they wanted to send me to a special summer camp and feed me drugs. My father, always the party pooper, nixed the idea. Whatever was wrong with me went untreated and I matured into the tangle of dysfunction and coping mechanisms I am today.

One thing that plagues me is my lack of confidence in my ability to read between the lines. In a perfect world, I would never have to. People would pick the words to convey the information needed and that would be that. I sometimes wonder if we would be better off without words. Animals get the point across just fine without them. When a dog barks from behind a gate, I know he is saying “Stay out of my yard, mister.” When the neighbor’s cat comes by and starts meowing loudly, he is saying “Fuck you, I’m a cat.”

It is worth noting that when raccoons make noises like they are space aliens, they probably are space aliens and I am too primitive to understand their language.

All of this got me thinking about how people came up with words in the first place. I figure a lot of them were onomatopoeia. Since spoken language is auditory, the meaning of words like “whoosh,” “snap,” and “kablooey” can be understood by those who have never heard the words before.

For words with a more visual meaning, hand gestures picked up the slack. I see evidence of this in gesture-heavy spoken Italian, which is pretty much sign language with sound effects. The sounds are committed to memory and the gestures eventually become decoration.

But where did things go from there? A lot of words got weighed down with prefixes and suffixes, most based on Latin but some on Greek. I suppose they were pretended and appended to add clarity, but for me they just added to the confusion. I mean, science is hard enough to grasp without having to watch out for pseudoscience.

It was not all bad news when it came to the expansion of language. Someone along the way came up with the portmanteau. Using available vocabulary, new words were forged by fusion. “Motel,” “brunch,” and my onomatopoeia favorite “shart” enriched the lexicon. There were a few misfires, which I suppose was unavoidable. “Glocalized” and “coopetition” were the result of making words so encompassing in meaning, they ceased to mean anything at all. To be fair, it was during the dot-com era and these words were no more ridiculous than the business plans people came up with while they were tripping balls on venture capital.

I wonder how many portmanteaus there are out there. More to the point, am I able to spot all of them? Some might look like ordinary words and had their fusion event happen a long time ago. Maybe it was so long ago, the spelling had a chance to change over time.

There is even the chance it was done by time travelers. I know this sounds absurd, but only because it is far-fetched right now. There will come a day when time travelers will be common as dirt. I do not know when, but that hardly matters. It is not required to predict the future as long as you accept that there is a lot of it.

OK, so time travel is possible, but why bring it up? The reason is to open one’s mind when looking for component words to a portmanteau. A legitimate possibility should not be discarded based on the erroneous assumption that it is an anachronism.

Let us look at the phrase “Where are you from?”

It is a rude thing to ask these days as it can mean you are sticking your nose into someone’s immigration status. However, it is safe to assume that questions about one’s point of origin was less politically charged in the past and that the same will hold true in the future.

Parsing the phrase with no offense intended or taken, we start with “where are you.” That seems simple enough. It is a request for current location. The word “from” is where it gets interesting. It is an old word in the English language and its origin remains unknown to those who do not choose to believe the lamestream dictionary.

Fear not. I have a theory. First off, an old word such as this has probably gone through one of those spelling changes I mentioned earlier and was originally written as “frum.” If that is not a time traveler’s portmanteau, I don’t know what is.

“Frum,” you see, comes from the fusion of “frozen” and “cum.” In the future, human breeding through copulation will be considered both unsanitary and disgusting. An injection of cryospooge will take its place and will be the common element of everyone’s point of origin.

Words, man.