Ben Macintyre writes on portmanteau words. I have a few querulous quibbles (querbles?) about some of his observations:

EVER SINCE THE SMOKING BAN in enclosed public places came into force last July, there has been a marked upsurge in smirting, proving that the great British public can adapt and adopt new words in the most unlikely circumstances. Smirting happens when two people, smoking outside, fall to flirting, and discover that they have more in common than simply nicotine.

Smirting is a portmanteau word, formed by packing parts of two words together to create another, combining the sense of each. Smirting is a first cousin of smog (smoke + fog). The notion of a portmanteau word is comparatively new. In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass (1871), Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice: “‘slithy' means ‘lithe and slimy'...You see it's like a portmanteau - there are two meanings packed up into one word”; later the doomed egg adds: “‘Mimsy' is 'flimsy and miserable' (there's another portmanteau...for you)”.

A portmanteau was a suitcase that hinged in the middle like a book, allowing one to carry clothes in one side and anything else in the other. The word is itself a portmanteau, formed by combining porter, the French for to carry, with manteau, meaning coat, cloak or mantle.

Before Carroll, the offspring of word marriages were rare, yet a number sneaked into the language anyway: dumbfound, a combination of dumb and confound, and twirl, a portmanteau of twist and swirl. In 1896, Punch invented “brunch”, combining breakfast and lunch.

Yet today the portmanteau is probably the most fertile vehicle for neologisms. Entire countries have been formed by packing two place names together: Tanzania, for example, was formed in 1964, linguistically speaking, by combining Tanganyika and Zanzibar. Many people seem to regard “Oxbridge” as a place, rather than an idea.

This last would explain the exam howler of the student who wrote that great men had often been to "public school and Uxbridge".

My querble with Macintyre's verbal is his claim that portmanteau is itself a portmanteau word. Isn't it merely a compound word, like portfolio, and very unlike Port Talbot? The definition is not exact, but surely, in the blending, both words must lose something of themselves. An unnamed blogger on this website gets closer when he writes:

Portmanteau words are those made up words you get when you SmashWordsTogetherLikeSo so damn hard that some letters fall off the start of one and off the end of the other.

Macintyre - a suitcase you put your whole mack into? - also believes that blog is a portmanteau word. Blog is, of course, short for weblog, although its origin is probably unknown to many bloggers. But it retains so little of "web" - just the colourless final B - that it can't really be said to be a blend - not unless you know the origin.

Back to smirting. To me this sounds far less innocent than smoking and flirting. It sounds like an obscene and rather violent sexual practice. I am not sure what, nor am I sure what word, other than smoke and flirt, is thrusting itself into the bemerded cavity of my mind.