Does "Muppet" mean "Marionette and puppet"?

This page documents the dubious claim that the word Muppet is a combination of "marionette" and "puppet".

Pro

 * 1978 -- Muppet Show Fan Club newsletter (vol. 1, no. 5): "The name Muppet, by the way, was coined by Jim to represent his own individual puppet designs, a combination of 'marionette' and 'puppet'."


 * 2001 -- Jim Henson's Designs and Doodles: "Jim came up with the name Muppets during the Sam and Friends years -- it is a combination of the words marionettes and puppets."

Con

 * 1956 (September 2) -- Washington Post: "A “muppet” according to Henson, is a cross between a hand puppet and a stick puppet. Henson thought up the term “muppet” in order to “have something distinctive.”"


 * 1957 (February 17) -- "For Jane and Jim, Rollicking Muppets Set a Merry Pace" by Katharine Elson, Washington Post and Times Herald: "Jim devised the name "muppets" (sic) for his brainchildren, because they're a cross between stick and hand puppets."


 * 1978 (December 25) -- "Those Marvelous Muppets" by John Skow, Time Magazine: "The word was coined from 'marionette' and 'puppet', says Jim Henson, 42, the skinny, bearded Zeus from whose brow the creatures began to spring 20-odd years ago, when he was a teenager hooked on television... Like other geniuses, Henson is a sly fellow whose sound artistic instinct is to resist critical analysis... Now he backtracks and says that "muppet" was simply a word that sounded good to him. The sound combination of puppet and marionette is merely an explanation that happens to sound logical."


 * 1982 (September 21) -- Jim Henson interview for Cinefantastique: "I think we did the term Muppets before we got the show Sam and Friends - a few months after I started working. It was really just a term we made up. For a long time I would tell people it was a combination of marionettes and puppets but, basically, it was really just a word that we coined. We have done very few things connected with marionettes."