And now we have the 'hawkerpreneur'. Really?!

ONE minute I'm ranting on Facebook about the word "hawkerpreneur". The next minute I'm wranting in the pages of The Business Times. Is there such a word as "wrante"? I don't see why there can't be if we are already clownking around with words like "hawkerpreneur"!

Look, I get portmanteaus. I can't be calling myself a Singlish-loving poet (or a singlet), which I am, if I disapprove of creating clever new words. A portmanteau does this by brazenly kneading together the sounds and meanings of two innocent words.

The original portmanteau is a leather suitcase that opens into two equal compartments. But its word is a portmanteau since porter, in French, means carry and manteau mantle. These days, we also sometimes hear the word "frankenword" - which is another portmanteau for, well, portmanteau.

There are portmanteaus such as "bromance", blending "bro" and "romance", and "Bollywood", joining "Bombay" and "Hollywood". I can chillax about "blog", from "web log", but less so about that double portmanteau "vlog", from "video" and "blog" - because I have bad ears.

We have portmanteaus in our own Singlish, and the very word "Singlish" is a portmanteau. My favourite Singlish portmanteau is the word "stupiak", which means being so stupid that others want to piak you. Which reminds me.

Please, if you're going to portmanteau, can you at least do it tastefully? "Hawkerpreneur" - urgh! - is as fugly as it gets. Whoever came up with this sadstrosity should be dragged out and made to rewrite the whole H volume of the Oxford English Dictionary by hand. What was he or she thinking?

But I feel it's likelier to be the masterpiece of some brilliant governmental hawkermittee. So why wasn't I or KF Seetoh of Makansutra consulted? (I hope Seetoh wasn't consulted.) You want a hip word to attract young blood, or bloung, into boosting our newly Unesco-certified intangture? Here's a free one: "hawkster". Or "hawkay". You could put into your brochures: "Looking for hawksum or hawkbu!"

"Hawkerpreneur" is plain terrigible! No real hawker has the time to pronounce that word. It is too long, consonantal, and unwieldy, and it grates on the ear. Your poor throat and lips have to lambada in rather unwholesome ways.

"Entrepreneur" came from the French verb entreprendre, meaning to undertake. "Hawker", more interestingly, came from the Low German word höker, meaning a pedlar.

In English, a hawker can also be a falconer, someone who hunts with a hawk - and that's a pretty cool undertone!

But go mix a German and a French sound, and you're heading for some oral pain. Plus how does "hawkerpreneur" even make sense - a hawker who is an entrepreneur?

What do you think hawkers have been doing all this time? Has no one seen the Rolex and Mercedes? Or is this yet another oh-so-subtle teaching point where now it's the hawkers' turn to be reminded about being more ambitious and risk-taking?

Well done then. If it is all an opportunity to spread more capitalist goodness, I hope someone remembers that not all entrepreneurs make it big. That is the nature of risk, and maybe some people don't need it.

Here's a counter-suggestion. How about calling an entrepreneur who works extremely hard and still cannot prosper "entrepreneurker"?

Why is it so difficult to celebrate our hawkers without treating what describes them disrespectfully?

Why not try lifting "hawker" out of our collective mental ghetto rather than trending a delusional word to push it down further?

Gone were the days when all this could have been done with an overt national campaign slogan like "Let's make money, Singapore!" or "No monee, no hawkee!"

But the goondifying is everywhere now. I read it in headlines, hear it on TV and radio and in the mouths of politicians, spot it as a curriculum. Soon there will be a National Day Rally speech about being hawkerpreneurial. No way I'll be eating at a hawkerpreneur centre - what's wrong with names like "Satay Club" or "Gluttons Bay"? God salp us.

• The writer is a poet, graphic artist and literary critic

READ MORE: Moving hawkers up the food chain