This is the allusionist in which I, Helen Zoltzman, throw language at the wall to see if it sticks.

Which came first, orange, to mean the fruit or orange to mean the colour.

Orange is the name of the fruit, can be traced back to 1st century India to a version of the Ayurvedic Medical Text, the Chiraka Samhita,

in which an orange tree is called a niranga, which itself derived from the old Sanskrit word nirunga, which may have meant fruit like elephants.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess they were referring to the similarity of the textures of the skins rather than oranges, tusks and trunk and grey colour.

Unless oranges have changed a lot in the last couple of thousand years.

The term niranga travelled with the fruits' west along trade routes going through Persian, Arabic, Armenian, Italian, Spanish and French variations,

at some point losing the n on its front before arriving in English around the 14th century.

Orange being used to describe the colour is first recorded in the early 1500s, before which they used terms such as saffron, gold, amber, and the old English hillow red, which meant yellow red.

So all of you who had money on the fruit preceding the colour go and collect your winnings and now on with the show.

Choco holic, Labrador, Smog, Televangelist, Tanzania, Email, Fanzine, Jazasai, Gelax, Vroman, Velcro, Grangelina, Christmacher, Codcast, Rethalizer, Jords,

Modern English is a wash with portmanto terms, words which have been formed from two or more words spliced together.

The word portmanto, meaning a piece of luggage, is itself a portmanto word from the 16th century, uniting the French words portée, meaning de carry, and Montau, meaning cloak.

But credit for the frankenward sense of portmanto 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 portmanto's like slidey, mimsy, gallump, and chortle.

You see, it's like a portmanto says Humpty Dumpty, there are two meanings packed up into one word.

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

Oh, you think you know what brunch means, but do you? Do you? Yeah, you do. But do you really?

I mean, the word itself clearly is breakfast and lunch. I think the knee jerk definition would be a meal that is part breakfast and part lunch.

That is Dan Paschmann, host of the food podcast The Spockful, and author of Eat More Better.

We met for brunch, and I forced him to fall down this semantics rabbit hole with me, because I want to know, if brunch combines breakfast and lunch,

does it do so by combining the typical foodstuffs of the two meals, or by taking place at some midpoint between the typical breakfast and lunch times?

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