Instead of a humblebrag, try an honorflip.

The precarious prevalence of the portmanteau, a device that sends words packing.

The Wall Street Journal reports that retro-enhanced CEOs and other bigshots—weirdly including tech execs—have taken to using “dumbphones” and fax machines. The story includes a 44-year-old maxillofacial cancer surgeon who carries a pager. (I’ve linked the word to Wikipedia for those whippersnappers who need an explanation.)

When the surgeon walks into a coffee shop, people know he’s a doctor because these days only doctors carry those little beepers. “They see the pager and usually, if they greet you, they greet you with ‘Good morning, doctor,’” he says.

The Journal labels his pager a humblebrag. It’s a way of showing off your prestigious ethos without seeming to.

As the ancient rhetoricians liked to say, rhetoric should disguise itself. It works best when it seems guileless—straightforward and unmanipulative. The pager lets the doc say “I’m a doctor!” without tapping everyone in the coffee shop on the shoulder and saying, “Did you know I’m a doctor?”

Humblebrag qualifies as a portmanteau, a figure that combines two words to make a brand-new portable word. The term comes from an old-fashioned suitcase with a hinge on the back, allowing the case to open into two equal parts. (Some clever leather artisan had designed the first portmanteau to fit over a horse.)

Be careful when you try to use the humblebrag yourself. It can backfire instantly, making you seem more braggadocious than humble. Its most egregious usage also happens to be the most common: the cloying “I’m humbled.” Joe Biden set my teeth on edge with his 2020 acceptance speech:

We’ve won with the most votes ever cast for a presidential ticket in the history of the nation, 74 million…I’m humbled by the trust and confidence you’ve placed in me.

But Biden was not alone with his passive-voiced humblebrag. Nearly every Oscar winner sweetly sings “I’m humbled” to the crowd of resentful celebs who failed to win. Why do honorees do this? Because “I’m humbled” constitutes a double brag.

I got this award and you didn’t and yet I’m still the same modest person you never knew I was!

It’s time to suss out the biography of that tricky word. This leads me tripping down that delightful etymological rabbit hole, the Oxford English Dictionary. I’m immediately distracted by one definition: the “humbles” are the innards of a deer. Also, the verb “to humble” means to remove the awns from barley. Which takes me down the side trail of awns: the beard, or awning, at the end of the sheath of a grain. Who needs Minecraft when you have the OED?

Back to the modest humble, whose adjective form implies a low opinion of someone. It comes from the Old French umble (because obviously those silly Continentals can’t pronounce the letter aitch), meaning lowly, mean, insignificant, base; a humble actor might play an extra in a movie crowd but would never, ever win an Oscar. Geoffrey Chaucer wrote in his fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales:

Humble folk been cristes freendes.

Not only are they Christ’s friends but they shall inherit the Earth; the Bible tells me so. Not that they’d ever win a presidential election. Still, the OED includes a more telling definition: to be humble also means to be modest. A seventeenth-century writer put it this way:

Christ was Humble, they are proud.

And this is exactly the kind of modesty that all those “humbled” politicians and celebrities try to convey. Still, what they are experiencing isn’t humility or abasement. They’re actually being honored. It strikes me that when someone receives an honor, they should do their best in exchange to honor the giver. To claim that the honor “humbles” the recipient implies an insult.

This gold statuette I’d run over my grandmother to get just makes me feel insignificant and base.

Hey, if you’re high and mighty, tell the people who honor you that they’re pretty great too! Instead of a humblebrag, try an honorflip.

I value this honor so much more, knowing that it’s coming from this great Academy/electorate/alma mater.

The honorflip is my very own portmanteau, which I made up this morning, and I’m just so humbled by my nerdy cleverness. Cue the applause while I clutch my pearls and look down modestly like just another one of cristes freendes.