Looking for New Blends

I was reading a marvelous essay yesterday evening by the former Editor in Chief of the now-defunct Portfolio magazine, Joanne Lipman, on challenges to women in the workplace in the last ten years, largely after 9/11. Well, long story short: she brought up references to Hillary's "cankles." And it got me wondering about the cultural and historical conditions necessarily to facilitate blending. It's really a counter-intuitive process, really, and I can't help but wonder if there's some reason why there are so many blended terms showing up here and there.

The classic blend, of course, is "smog"--from "smoke" and "fog." And there's a nice logic to the equation. The two source words are both monosyllabic, both ending in a velar stop consonant. So they seem like a marriage made in, well, Los Angeles.

But what about "cankles." How logic defying? "Calf"--a monosyllable--meetd up with "ankle"--an unattractive double syllable--and somehow gives birth to "cankle," a word as displeasing as the supposed intersection of the two structures on one's lower extremity.

So are there new rules for blends? I'd love to come up with a catalog of these (in my copious spare time, of course) and see if the combinatory conditions that facilitate a blend have changed somehow in the last twenty years. Intuitively, I say "Yes." Of course, I've also learned that anecdotal evidence is the worst, so I'm looking for something testable here.