Nomenclature:
Definitions & Meanings

Angertainment: A Portmanteau

The word portmanteau originated in France in the 1560s. A noun, it came to describe a large traveling bag or suitcase that opened into two halves. In its earliest usage, it referred to a person: a member of a nobleman’s court who carried his princes mantle. The word combines the imperative tense of the French verb to carry (porte from the verb porter) with the word for a cloak or mantle (manteau).

Lexicographers and linguists owe a debt to Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, for repurposing “portmanteau” as a description for words. Humpty Dumpty provides Alice with a definition of one of the odd words in Jabberwocky in Carrolls 1872 novel Through the Looking Glass:

“Well, SLITHY means lithe and slimy. Lithe is the same as active. You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.”

This new, additional definition for portmanteau was added to dictionaries along with several new vocabulary entries such as chortle, frumious, and galumph as a result of Dodgson's wordplay.

Angertainment is an emerging portmanteau. A Google search for the word today yields more than 14,000 references. With the publication of this analysis, a concerned citizen may hope that its use will increase.

A Brief Definition

Anger + entertainment = angertainment: a growing, highly profitable segment of the media-industrial complex; a new career path for media-savvy individuals seeking employment, professional growth, and celebrity.

For anyone with even a passing familiarity with the modern American media landscape, the meaning of the word angertainment is clear. It provides instant recognition. It provides a useful label that we can use to help people identify a particular kind of media and media personality. But before diving into the contemporary use of the word, we need to separate the components and take a closer look at each one. As with the classical portmanteau, this is a word that has two meanings—possibly more than two meanings—packed inside. A deeper examination of the components is in order.

Anger

At first glance, it might seem that anger is easy to define.

anger [ang-ger] 

noun: a strong feeling of annoyance, displeasure, hostility, or belligerence caused by being wronged; wrath; ire. 

verb: the arousal of anger, wrath, or ire

Let’s start with the noun. Anger can generally be described as an emotional state characterized by a subject feeling antagonism toward someone or something. Typically, this anger is a response to something. For that reason, psychologists classify anger as a secondary emotion. Anger is provoked because the subject feels someone has deliberately done something objectionable. The subject feels wronged.

A deeper examination of anger opens up an array of different types of anger. For example, while open aggression is easy to identify and understand, many human relationships are beset with more complex forms of anger such as passive aggression. Open conflict is replaced by a war of nerves. The tensions and emotions may run just as high, but everything is covered by a façade.

There are additional layers of complexity. As a secondary emotion, psychologists see anger as a result of other actions or emotions. Even when there is a seemingly obvious cause for anger—a traffic accident, say—an angry response may be fueled by other factors (an incident at work, a family dispute, etc.) and cause it to explode into road rage. Economic problems, relationship issues, trouble in the workplace: a host of other issues can provide the tinder that fuels a sudden outburst of flaming anger.

When probing for the secondary causes of anger, a psychologist looks for deeper, primary emotions including fear, pain, and frustration.

Pain? There is a simple equation. If someone hits and hurts you, what is your response? Anger. Frustration? You spend hours trying to accomplish a task or solve a problem without success. Yes, you get angry. It doesn’t help you accomplish your goal usually, but it is a common response. Fully understandable. In the context of angertainment, emotions like pain and frustration are less important. Angertainment thrives on the first primal element that psychologists identify as a primary cause of anger: fear.

Anger and Fear

Fear pervades life in 21st Century America. Our entertainment universe is dominated by fear-based drama. First and foremost, the U.S. population is immersed in crime and law enforcement dramas. The estimates vary but suggest that the average American child will witness 200,000 acts of violence and more than 10,000 murders before turning 18 years old. Continuing at the same pace, at age 65, the avid television viewer will have spent more than 6 years watching television and witnessed more than 33,000 murders.

In real life, violence and murder are statistically rare. But the frequency of real-world violence is exaggerated by news media—especially television news. How is news coverage determined? Producers and reporters are competing for ratings, and so they pick the most compelling stories of the day. An old saying that describes television news judgment: “If it bleeds, it leads.” As a result, news coverage is distorted.

Crime, violence, and murder do occur in the real world, but most Americans are rarely or never affected. That doesn’t matter. Seeing enactments on television or reading news reports, Americans have an exaggerated fear of crime. We are generally mistrustful of others. We worry unnecessarily. We are, as a nation, afraid.

Fear of Others

Demographic trends instill another form of fear in Americans: Fear of being usurped. If current trends continue, the United States will become a “majority minority” nation in about two decades (2044 is the current predicted date). White Americans will be outnumbered by the combined Black, Hispanic, and Asian populations. American history, especially our history of enslavement, racial segregation, and the long journey toward some semblance of racial justice, suggests that this will not be a moment of celebration.

There are those who will deny this reality, but the United States remains a deeply polarized and in many respects, a racist nation. The political order in the former Confederate states was defined by racism for decades. Segregation created a caste system. Southern white elites enacted and used Jim Crow laws to assure the poor white population that however difficult life might be for them, they were always better off than Black Americans. For the century following the Civil War, Jim Crow established the rule of law. Lynchings were commonplace.

Nor did Jim Crow make a peaceful exit. Bloodshed and violence marred the civil rights era. And while many of the legal barriers to the full rights of citizenship were cleared away, obstructions remain. These obstructions have been bolstered by a pervasive undercurrent of racism that exists to this day. We want to believe that as a nation, we may be imperfect but we are getting better—that despite our past our social behaviour is trending toward justice. In our view, after the real progress that was achieved in the 20th Century, we have fallen into an era of stagnation and regression. Racism is alive and well. With the aid of the Internet, white nationalism is spreading in the United States.

The driving force behind all of this social conflict—Jim Crow and his descendants and white nationalism—is fear. This is the fear of usurpation; of losing status or becoming part of a lower social caste. It is ultimately the fear that some “other” person will have the right to sit beside you rather than in the back of the bus where they belong.

Anxious America

American life is filled with other fears as well; other causes for anger. There is the fear of contradiction. Insolent back talk and angry responses are a part of family life, especially in the relationships between parents and children. It can be a daily occurrence, and as we all know, frequently a source of anger for parents, children, or both.

Beyond the family, what happens when the confident co-worker or citizen is told that he is wrong? Will he reexamine the facts and make a considered judgment—or will he get mad and reject information out of hand? Confidence, the certainty that one is right, is kindling for anger.

Fear is created by culture. We live with taboos, and the breaking of a taboo can be a cause for anger. American patriotism is filled with taboos surrounding activities such as the playing of the national anthem or reciting the pledge of allegiance. Breaking one of those taboos—getting down on one knee instead of standing for the national anthem—will cause waves of anger.

Religion and religious conflict bring fear and anger with them. True believers armed with righteousness may go as far as declaring war on unbelievers. Even in non-hostile settings, the fear of apostasy can cause anger and alienation. The believer says “I’m right. My way is right. If you think/act/are different, you are wrong and you may bring shame or worse down upon us.”

Commercialized Fear—The FUD Factor

The artificial creation of fear can be profitable; it can be used for leverage. FUD, as an acronym for fear, uncertainty, and doubt, gained widespread notoriety in the 1970s. The term gained recognition in the context of salesmanship—famously in the effort to sell IBM mainframe computers.

The IBM Corporation was the market leader in computer sales during the 1950s and 60s. It dominated the market for large computers (mainframes) with more than 80 percent market share. If someone needed a computer, they called IBM.

But competition did arrive: Amdahl, Honeywell, Burroughs, NEC, and others. In many cases, the competitors machines provided more computational power at a lower price. One response from the IBM sales force, rather than competing on specifications or price, was to question the capability of these newcomers. The goal of the sales rep was to raise doubts about the competitors equipment and cause buyers to be uncertain. Ultimately, the goal was to cause buyers to fear the results of a “bad” decision and go with the “safe” choice. “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM equipment,” it was said.

While FUD provides a good example of the use of fear as a means to a commercial end, it seems less likely to result in the kind of overt anger we’ve been describing. However, FUD has been repurposed as a central component in angertainment and deserves a place in our catalog of fears. The sales team at IBM and other businesses who employed FUD as a part of their sales kit could not have anticipated that FUD would morph into the powerful force that it is today; a major component of angertainment and the catalyst for national and global movements.

FUD delayed the recognition or smoking as a serious health risk for decades. Today, fossil fuel companies and politicians are relying on FUD to delay or roll back efforts to slow down global warming.

Entertainment

Entertainment seems, at least on the surface, a lot easier to understand than the psychological/emotional concepts of fear and anger.

The earliest usage of entertainment, from the 16th century, related to the provision of support to a retainer—a sort of dependent who relied on a higher ranking individual. In the 17th century the word began to take its current meaning; some form of public performance designed to amuse onlookers. The usage evolved to encompass keeping someone in a certain frame of mind.

Entertainment, then, has two central elements. First, it requires the capturing of a persons or an audience’s attention. “Hey, look at me.”

Then comes the more challenging task of keeping the audience’s attention; doing or saying things that make people want to maintain the connection—to stay “tuned in.”

Entertainment comes in simple forms; a parent seeking the attention of an unhappy child, providing something different for the child to react to.

“Peek-a-boo.” And again. And again. Keeping the child’s attention; distracting the child from the original source of unhappiness.

The desire for attention and the opportunity to entertain others is integral to human interaction. Children throw tantrums and “act out” in ways that echo dramatic actors emotional “hey look at me” performances on stage and screen.

Whether it is humor, anger, or amazement, entertainment is all about getting an audience’s attention, keeping it “tuned in.” In this context, fear is a reliable, time-tested emotional tool.

Entertainment Gets Real

When we entertain children, we frequently think of it as “distraction.” We know we are deliberately trying to change the subject; redirect the attention of our small audience for some good reason that we older people understand. As audiences grow older and more sophisticated, can we say that entertainment and distraction are similar? Are these two words synonyms?

In the realm of angertainment, there is a plausible argument to be made that yes, entertainment and distraction are synonymous if not perfect word substitutes.

Additional meanings of entertainment also resonate in the context of this inquiry. There is the sense of welcoming a guest and providing hospitality. That “welcoming” feeling is an essential element in many forms of entertainment; the comfortable feeling of familiarity you might find in Mr. Rogers Neighborhood or on a visit to Sesame Street.

Entertainment also refers to the willingness of someone to consider some possibility; to “entertain” a notion. In that meaning, entertainment opens the door to a wider field of vision. Consider documentary filmmaking, for example, from *The Living Desert* to *The March of the Penguins*. Great documentaries can be both hugely entertaining and very informative.

And where, exactly, is the border between the documentary and “reality TV?” Thats a question that deserves a great deal of attention.

One Who Entertains

The entertainer is integral to the idea of entertainment. In the small entertainment scenarios of daily life, we don’t identify someone as an entertainer. Parents and siblings who distract younger children are just living life as it is; there’s no special designation. But as children age, entertainers begin to emerge. The class clown, that kid who is just so naturally funny, everyone gets a laugh. Music and dance provide opportunities for growing new entertainers. School arts programs allow them to flourish.

Over time, the pressures of real life and the real world quash the aspirations of the majority of youthful traditional (acting/music/dance) entertainment hopefuls. But now, in the 21st Century, the cadre of would-be entertainers is growing exponentially thanks to the rise of social media: influencers, bloggers, TikTokers, and so on. At the same time, the traditional gatekeepers—radio stations, TV networks, newspaper publishers—have lost their ability to control the media. Opportunities for outsiders have expanded exponentially due to the proliferation of communication channels and the low cost of entry. The result: We are living in a time when a vast number of people are trying to get our attention in order to entertain us. If there were hundreds of people vying for a role as an entertainer in the late 20th Century, there are thousands and perhaps tens of thousands seeking our attention today.

Not only are the numbers immense—the level of talent and skill is extraordinary, too. These people have grown up with extensive exposure to all kinds of media presentations. Many of them have gone to school and studied their craft, taken classes in the arts, practiced and learned how to create, manage, and fine-tune their media. In other cases, it’s a clever person with a mobile phone who is garnering worldwide attention. While we can’t quantify the human resources available, it is readily apparent that there are thousands of people available and ready to compete for every living wage opportunity that comes into existence in the commercial entertainment marketplace.

Putting It Together: Angertainment

The entertainer lives to be the center of attention. The entertainer must seize the attention of the audience and hold it. This is done by design—it’s a show. Yet at the same time, counterintuitively, the entertainer may also be distracting the audience. Like a magician, the angertainers perform their acts in such a way that the audience doesn’t notice what else that is going on. 

The entertainer has another crucial task: creating engagement to keep the audience watching or listening. That is the same challenge the angertainer faces, creating engagement. "Engagement" is the primary currency of the entertainment, angertainment, and social media industries. It is how "audiences" are measured--by the number of individuals and by the amount of time they remain "engaged." 

Anger and entertainment, when combined produce angertainment--media content that captures attention through manufactured outrage, holds audiences through fear-based engagement, and profits from the resulting emotional investment of viewers who mistake performance for authentic discourse.

Angertainment is a carefully manufactured product: Unverified content that is designed to look like journalism, that is spread by various media, then repeated by social media, all with the goal of making money.