Lexical blends such as Brexit < Britain + exit have been referred to in literature as instances of word play. The playful character of blends underlie their use in such domains as slang, advertising and political media. As has been shown, blending a personal name with a common noun, e.g. Haputin < hapat’ (grab) + Putin goes along with a variety of derogatory language means. Building on the findings in Beliaeva and Knoblock (2020), this study investigates factors that may trigger the use of lexical blending as verbal aggression and aims to explore derogatory meanings of blends referring to people. It is hypothesized that blending a personal name with another word enhances the likelihood of inducing derogatory meaning. Sample texts containing blends are extracted from the Now corpus and the iWeb corpus and analysed for the presence of emotionally coloured lexical elements. The results of the study suggest that the context of blends differs from the context of their non-blended counterparts, and reveal specific features in the use of blended words with human referents.

This chapter deals with the ways dynastic consciousness was expressed in naming and numbering practices. It was very unusual for a medieval dynasty to have a name. Dynastic labels such as Plantagenet and Capetian are modern constructions. Ruling dynasties with hereditary surnames are exceptional, the main cases being in Ireland and Byzantium after the eleventh century. However, dynastic identity was expressed in the choice of personal names, some of which were so characteristic of a family that it is often assumed that anyone bearing them is likely to be a member. The term “Carolingian”, derived from the recurrent dynastic name “Charles” is analysed as an example. New names were introduced into dynasties through marriage and through free choice of names for younger sons. Examples of a conscious change of name usually have political significance. Numbering of monarchs began with the papacy and spread slowly and unevenly. The systems of numbering always imply a starting point and a claim to continuity. Examples analysed in detail here include the Holy Roman Emperors, the post-Conquest kings of England and the kings of Leon-Castile. The conclusion is that “a number for a monarch is far from a neutral tool of chronology”.