FELICITY CLOAKE: It's very nerveracking because people spend money on ingredients, they may be cooking it for a special occasion, they try to impress a date or whatever - there's a lot that can go wrong with food and it's quite a weighty responsibility to be responsible someone's dinner or their birthday cake or whatever; it is a big deal.

RACHEL GREENHAUS: If it's a cookbook for family use, you're going to write it differently than if it's a cookbook for expert bakers and figuring out how to get the recipe that's right for that.

MIMI AYE: It's very different from cooking in real life, I think. Which is weird because you're trying to tell people how to cook the dish.

RACHEL GREENHAUS: It would be really easy to show you, but it's hard to describe in language.

MIMI AYE: Yeah, it's a complete nightmare.

Motel. Email. Chocoholic. Labradoodle. Fanzine. Tanzania. Jazzercise. Breathalyzer. Televangelist. Chillax. Smog. Bromance. Velcro. Brangelina. Chrismukkah. Podcast. Jorts.

Modern English is awash with portmanteau terms, words formed from two or more words spliced together. The word ‘Portmanteau’, meaning a piece of luggage, is itself a portmanteau word from the 16th century, uniting the French words ‘porter’, meaning ‘to carry’, and ‘manteau’, meaning cloak. But credit for the Frankenword sense of 'portmanteau' goes to Lewis Carroll, in Alice Through The Looking Glass. Alice asks Humpty Dumpty to help her make sense of the Jabberwocky poem, full of portmanteaus like slithy, mimsy, galumph and chortle. “You see it's like a portmanteau,” says Humpty Dumpty, “there are two meanings packed up into one word.”

Today, I want to unpack one particular portmanteau, and that portmanteau is 'brunch'.