Subtitled: Eat your heart out, Tomkat.
“What’s a Stellian?” people often ask me. (This is the natural progression from, “Wait, you’re like a WARNER Warner?”)
It’s a good question, seeing as it’s a made up word. It’s not even a real name. I looked up “Stellian” on WhitePages.com one time when I decided I would like to marry someone who could provide a humorous surname hyphenation — he doesn’t exist. (Update: upon redoing this search, I discovered a 68-year-old man by the name of Stellian in Kansas. Wonder if he’s on Facebook…)
And it’s not a fast horse, nor a foreign word — that I know of. Stellian is what’s called a portmanteau.
You might be familiar with portmanteaus from some Stellian imitators, whom I’ll show below:
Back in the early ’50s, Steve and Lillian Farkas combined their first names to create Stellian Appliance on Snelling and Larpenteur, where my grandpa Jim Warner would begin working a few years later. Jim Warner bought Stellian in 1971, after years of faithful service, and added his family’s name to the already-established local store (Back then it would’ve been, “What’s a Warner?”).
We still own that location and since have added six more in the time that media covering celebrity supercouples have caught wind of Steve and Lillian’s genius.
Warners’ Stellian: spurring imitation for more than 50 years.