Benrus is an American watchmaking and lifestyle company founded as a watch repair shop in New York City in 1921 by Romanian-American Benjamin Lazrus and his two brothers. Benrus watches were worn for decades by the U.S. military from World War II through Vietnam .
43-483: The name "Benrus" is a portmanteau of the name of cofounder Ben jamin Laz rus . In the 1920s the company transitioned from watch repair to the manufacture of watchcases and assembly of completed watches using imported internal components from La Chaux-de-Fonds , Switzerland. During World War II , the company stopped manufacturing watches and switched to the manufacture of timing systems (e.g. fuses ) used in munitions . In
86-413: A blend —also known as a blend word , lexical blend , or portmanteau —is a word formed by combining the meanings, and parts of the sounds, of two or more words together. English examples include smog , coined by blending smoke and fog , as well as motel , from motor ( motorist ) and hotel . A blend is similar to a contraction . On the one hand, mainstream blends tend to be formed at
129-689: A hostname ( www.example.com ), and a file name ( index.html ). Uniform Resource Locators were defined in RFC 1738 in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee , the inventor of the World Wide Web , and the URI working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), as an outcome of collaboration started at the IETF Living Documents birds of a feather session in 1992. The format combines
172-431: A URL by performing an HTTP request to the specified host, by default on port number 80. URLs using the https scheme require that requests and responses be made over a secure connection to the website . Internet users are distributed throughout the world using a wide variety of languages and alphabets, and expect to be able to create URLs in their own local alphabets. An Internationalized Resource Identifier (IRI)
215-523: A form suitable for carrying on horseback; (now esp.) one in the form of a stiff leather case hinged at the back to open into two equal parts". According to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language ( AHD ), the etymology of the word is the French porte-manteau , from porter , "to carry", and manteau , "cloak" (from Old French mantel , from Latin mantellum ). According to
258-427: A kind of bath), the attributive blends of English are mostly head-final and mostly endocentric . As an example of an exocentric attributive blend, Fruitopia may metaphorically take the buyer to a fruity utopia (and not a utopian fruit); however, it is not a utopia but a drink. Coordinate blends (also called associative or portmanteau blends) combine two words having equal status, and have two heads. Thus brunch
301-622: A mere splinter or leftover word fragment. For instance, starfish is a compound, not a blend, of star and fish , as it includes both words in full. However, if it were called a " stish " or a " starsh ", it would be a blend. Furthermore, when blends are formed by shortening established compounds or phrases, they can be considered clipped compounds , such as romcom for romantic comedy . Blends of two or more words may be classified from each of three viewpoints: morphotactic, morphonological, and morphosemantic. Blends may be classified morphotactically into two kinds: total and partial . In
344-469: A part of the United States Department of Justice Antitrust Manual with regard to the establishment of preliminary injunctions in antitrust cases . In the 1960s, the company introduced self-winding watches and entered into the automobile market with steering wheel -mounted self-winding clocks. Also in this decade, Jerry Lewis was hired as a pitchman for the company's Belforte brand. In
387-401: A particular historical moment followed by a rapid rise in popularity. Contractions, on the other hand, are formed by the gradual drifting together of words over time due to them commonly appearing together in sequence, such as do not naturally becoming don't (phonologically, / d uː n ɒ t / becoming / d oʊ n t / ). A blend also differs from a compound , which fully preserves
430-459: A strategy of diversification into military timepieces and costume jewelry . Nonetheless, Benrus filed for bankruptcy in 1977. The company emerged from this after a reorganization which involved entering into a joint venture agreement with the Wells and Roka Watch Company. Thereafter, the company marketed watches under the two tradenames of Benrus and Sovereign, contingent on royalty payments through
473-481: A total blend, each of the words creating the blend is reduced to a mere splinter. Some linguists limit blends to these (perhaps with additional conditions): for example, Ingo Plag considers "proper blends" to be total blends that semantically are coordinate, the remainder being "shortened compounds". Commonly for English blends, the beginning of one word is followed by the end of another: Much less commonly in English,
SECTION 10
#1732923177731516-485: Is frankenword , an autological word exemplifying the phenomenon it describes, blending " Frankenstein " and "word". URL A uniform resource locator ( URL ), colloquially known as an address on the Web , is a reference to a resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), although many people use
559-424: Is undefined if it has an associated delimiter and the delimiter does not appear in the URI; the scheme and path components are always defined. A component is empty if it has no characters; the scheme component is always non-empty. The authority component consists of subcomponents : This is represented in a syntax diagram as: [REDACTED] The URI comprises: A web browser will usually dereference
602-477: Is a Japanese blend that has entered the English language. The Vietnamese language also encourages blend words formed from Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary . For example, the term Việt Cộng is derived from the first syllables of "Việt Nam" (Vietnam) and "Cộng sản" (communist). Many corporate brand names , trademarks, and initiatives, as well as names of corporations and organizations themselves, are blends. For example, Wiktionary , one of Misplaced Pages 's sister projects,
645-489: Is a blend of wiki and dictionary . The word portmanteau was introduced in this sense by Lewis Carroll in the book Through the Looking-Glass (1871), where Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the coinage of unusual words used in " Jabberwocky ". Slithy means "slimy and lithe" and mimsy means "miserable and flimsy". Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the practice of combining words in various ways, comparing it to
688-603: Is a form of URL that includes Unicode characters. All modern browsers support IRIs. The parts of the URL requiring special treatment for different alphabets are the domain name and path. The domain name in the IRI is known as an Internationalized Domain Name (IDN). Web and Internet software automatically convert the domain name into punycode usable by the Domain Name System ; for example,
731-440: Is both phonological and orthographic, but with no other shortening: The overlap may be both phonological and orthographic, and with some additional shortening to at least one of the ingredients: Such an overlap may be discontinuous: These are also termed imperfect blends. It can occur with three components: The phonological overlap need not also be orthographic: If the phonological but non-orthographic overlap encompasses
774-692: Is neither a breakfasty lunch nor a lunchtime breakfast but instead some hybrid of breakfast and lunch; Oxbridge is equally Oxford and Cambridge universities. This too parallels (conventional, non-blend) compounds: an actor–director is equally an actor and a director. Two kinds of coordinate blends are particularly conspicuous: those that combine (near‑) synonyms: and those that combine (near‑) opposites: Blending can also apply to roots rather than words, for instance in Israeli Hebrew : "There are two possible etymological analyses for Israeli Hebrew כספר kaspár 'bank clerk, teller'. The first
817-405: Is that it consists of (Hebrew>) Israeli כסף késef 'money' and the ( International /Hebrew>) Israeli agentive suffix ר- -ár . The second is that it is a quasi- portmanteau word which blends כסף késef 'money' and (Hebrew>) Israeli ספר √spr 'count'. Israeli Hebrew כספר kaspár started as a brand name but soon entered the common language. Even if the second analysis is the correct one,
860-534: The Elgin , Waltham , and Gruen brands. According to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Benrus is owned by Benrus Holdings, LLC A luxury wristwatch company, released two watches, N°1 and Philo. In 2014, Giovanni Feroce acquired the license and trademarks for Benrus with the intention of transforming Benrus into a lifestyle brand with wristwatches as the core element. In 2017, Feroce lost control of
903-520: The OED Online , the etymology of the word is the "officer who carries the mantle of a person in a high position (1507 in Middle French), case or bag for carrying clothing (1547), clothes rack (1640)". In modern French, a porte-manteau is a clothes valet , a coat-tree or similar article of furniture for hanging up jackets, hats, umbrellas and the like. An occasional synonym for "portmanteau word"
SECTION 20
#1732923177731946-469: The joint venture . Benrus filed for bankruptcy once more in 1981, due to defaulting of its royalty payments. By 1984, the company had taken on the name Wells-Benrus Corp. and was operating under a bankruptcy agreement where the company owed $ 12 million to Victor Kiam and sought to borrow additional funds to maintain operations. The Wells-Benrus company was based in Middlebury, Connecticut . The Benrus brand
989-432: The stems of the original words. The British lecturer Valerie Adams's 1973 Introduction to Modern English Word-Formation explains that "In words such as motel ..., hotel is represented by various shorter substitutes – ‑otel ... – which I shall call splinters. Words containing splinters I shall call blends". Thus, at least one of the parts of a blend, strictly speaking, is not a complete morpheme , but instead
1032-587: The 1940s and 1950s, Benrus released the Sky Chief (a chronograph ), the Dial-a-Rama, the Wrist Alarm and a bracelet watch called Embraceable. In the early 1950s, Benrus failed in a hostile takeover of Hamilton , and subsequently lost a legal battle with Hamilton in which Benrus had acquired Hamilton stock for the stated purpose of investment but for the actual purpose of control. The decision in this case has become
1075-468: The Chinese URL http://例子.卷筒纸 becomes http://xn--fsqu00a.xn--3lr804guic/ . The xn-- indicates that the character was not originally ASCII . The URL path name can also be specified by the user in the local writing system. If not already encoded, it is converted to UTF-8 , and any characters not part of the basic URL character set are escaped as hexadecimal using percent-encoding ; for example,
1118-536: The Mark (Benrus) and/or related Intellectual Property." Feroce and his entity are blocked from the usage of the benrus.com URL . A receiver was appointed by the court to liquidate the assets of the former business with numerous creditors seeking payment. In 2018, the Buffalo Bills sued Benrus and Feroce for breach of contract, alleging nonpayment of $ 1M from a sponsorship agreement. Portmanteau In linguistics ,
1161-495: The Web , Berners-Lee emphasizes his preference for the original inclusion of "universal" in the expansion rather than the word "uniform", to which it was later changed, and he gives a brief account of the contention that led to the change. Every HTTP URL conforms to the syntax of a generic URI. The URI generic syntax consists of five components organized hierarchically in order of decreasing significance from left to right: A component
1204-502: The beginning of one word may be followed by the beginning of another: Some linguists do not regard beginning+beginning concatenations as blends, instead calling them complex clippings, clipping compounds or clipped compounds . Unusually in English, the end of one word may be followed by the end of another: A splinter of one word may replace part of another, as in three coined by Lewis Carroll in " Jabberwocky ": They are sometimes termed intercalative blends; these words are among
1247-524: The colon following the first component of a URI, the two slashes before the domain name were unnecessary. Early WorldWideWeb collaborators including Berners-Lee originally proposed the use of UDIs: Universal Document Identifiers. An early (1993) draft of the HTML Specification referred to "Universal" Resource Locators. This was dropped some time between June 1994 ( RFC 1630 ) and October 1994 (draft-ietf-uri-url-08.txt). In his book Weaving
1290-485: The early 1960s, the Federal Trade Commission determined that Benrus' marketing practices—specifically, its published list prices —were misleading for a substantial minority (about 14%) of potential customers at the time. The company was sold to Victor Kiam , later of Remington Razors , in 1967. Over the next ten years, the company suffered in competition against inexpensive Japanese wristwatches , adopting
1333-586: The final syllable ר- -ár apparently facilitated nativization since it was regarded as the Hebrew suffix ר- -år (probably of Persian pedigree), which usually refers to craftsmen and professionals, for instance as in Mendele Mocher Sforim 's coinage סמרטוטר smartutár 'rag-dealer'." Blending may occur with an error in lexical selection , the process by which a speaker uses his semantic knowledge to choose words. Lewis Carroll's explanation, which gave rise to
Benrus - Misplaced Pages Continue
1376-403: The ingredients is the head and the other is attributive. A porta-light is a portable light, not a 'light-emitting' or light portability; light is the head. A snobject is a snobbery-satisfying object and not an objective or other kind of snob; object is the head. As is also true for (conventional, non-blend) attributive compounds (among which bathroom , for example, is a kind of room, not
1419-490: The morphemes or phonemes stay in the same position within the syllable. Some languages, like Japanese , encourage the shortening and merging of borrowed foreign words (as in gairaigo ), because they are long or difficult to pronounce in the target language. For example, karaoke , a combination of the Japanese word kara (meaning empty ) and the clipped form oke of the English loanword "orchestra" (J. ōkesutora , オーケストラ ),
1462-495: The original "portmanteaus" for which this meaning of the word was created. In a partial blend, one entire word is concatenated with a splinter from another. Some linguists do not recognize these as blends. An entire word may be followed by a splinter: A splinter may be followed by an entire word: An entire word may replace part of another: These have also been called sandwich words, and classed among intercalative blends. (When two words are combined in their entirety,
1505-504: The pre-existing system of domain names (created in 1985) with file path syntax, where slashes are used to separate directory and filenames . Conventions already existed where server names could be prefixed to complete file paths, preceded by a double slash ( // ). Berners-Lee later expressed regret at the use of dots to separate the parts of the domain name within URIs , wishing he had used slashes throughout, and also said that, given
1548-453: The result is considered a compound word rather than a blend. For example, bagpipe is a compound, not a blend, of bag and pipe. ) Morphologically, blends fall into two kinds: overlapping and non-overlapping . Overlapping blends are those for which the ingredients' consonants, vowels or even syllables overlap to some extent. The overlap can be of different kinds. These are also called haplologic blends. There may be an overlap that
1591-480: The then-common type of luggage , which opens into two equal parts: You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word. In his introduction to his 1876 poem The Hunting of the Snark , Carroll again uses portmanteau when discussing lexical selection: Humpty Dumpty's theory, of two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau, seems to me the right explanation for all. For instance, take
1634-511: The trademarks when he failed to make payments to the previous owners. The new ownership group of the Benrus trademarks was granted a temporary restraining order by Superior Court Judge Michael Silverstein barring any interference with the brand from Feroce's former company. According to court documents, Feroce and his entity are "temporarily restrained from utilizing, advertising, selling, marketing, disposing, transferring and encumbering any goods bearing
1677-417: The two terms interchangeably. URLs occur most commonly to reference web pages ( HTTP / HTTPS ) but are also used for file transfer ( FTP ), email ( mailto ), database access ( JDBC ), and many other applications. Most web browsers display the URL of a web page above the page in an address bar . A typical URL could have the form http://www.example.com/index.html , which indicates a protocol ( http ),
1720-462: The two words "fuming" and "furious". Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first … if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say "frumious". In then-contemporary English, a portmanteau was a suitcase that opened into two equal sections. According to the OED Online , a portmanteau is a "case or bag for carrying clothing and other belongings when travelling; (originally) one of
1763-406: The use of 'portmanteau' for such combinations, was: Humpty Dumpty's theory, of two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau, seems to me the right explanation for all. For instance, take the two words "fuming" and "furious." Make up your mind that you will say both words ... you will say "frumious." The errors are based on similarity of meanings, rather than phonological similarities, and
Benrus - Misplaced Pages Continue
1806-542: The whole of the shorter ingredient, as in then the effect depends on orthography alone. (They are also called orthographic blends. ) An orthographic overlap need not also be phonological: For some linguists, an overlap is a condition for a blend. Non-overlapping blends (also called substitution blends) have no overlap, whether phonological or orthographic: Morphosemantically, blends fall into two kinds: attributive and coordinate . Attributive blends (also called syntactic or telescope blends) are those in which one of
1849-464: Was acquired from the Wells-Benrus company by Clinton Watch Company of Chicago in 1981, which renamed the business Benrus Watch Company. Irving Wein, the owner, brought Benrus distribution to large catalogs and retailers such as Walmart , Kmart , Sears , and JC Penney . The Benrus brand thrived during the 1980s and 1990s until it was sold to M.Z. Berger, a watch importer which had previously acquired
#730269