A quick search showed I’m hardly the first person to wonder how to pronounce some of the emerging Portmanteau words of the technology era. The word I had in mind was “favicon,” a blend of “favorite” as in URL and “icon,” which of course is what that little character is– the graphic that appears alongside visited URLs and in the page tabs in your browser.
Everyone has their own rationale, and many times what comes out is based not on the “favorite-icon” etymology but on cultural or cognitive influences, different for each person. To make this chaos less awkward, I propose that we take the pronunciation pattern from another analog, the river Rubicon, as in “Caesar crossing the Rubicon.” So we have:
- For favicon, the sense and sound of “fave” inserted into {rube´}ih-con
- For emoticon, the sense and sound of “emote” inserted into {rube´}ih-con
- And the same pattern for any new combinations as they appear.
After all, you don’t usually say “Sill Icon Valley” (or do you?)
Now you can pronounce those new buzzwords with confidence, having this guide as your onomasticon; the paragon of foregone, agreed upon bygones.
(And if you have your own preferred guideline, by all means add it to the comments! The more, the merrier.)
