KLOBYMOLOGY

Somebody recently requested that I cover the word Klobmentum, which I thought was an interesting project. If you haven't been following the Democratic presidential primary, the term has been adopted by news outlets from the New York Times to channel television stations around the country to refer to Amy Klobuchar's unexpectedly good showings in New Hampshire and Iowa, and the anticipated surge associated with them. It's part of a wider trend among Klobuchar supporters to make portmanteaus such as Klobusurge and Klobucharmy, and (according to Twitter analytics) it emerged in late January and really took off in usage following her delegate win in Iowa. The parsing is curious, and almost seems linguistically unnatural, but, as other linguists noted online, perhaps Klo- alone could not work as a morpheme. It will be entertaining to watch this word develop further as the primary season progresses!