bhaskar saikia

Yesterday, my colleague went for an early lunch at 12, though he usually waits until 1. He mentioned he skipped breakfast, so he had a “brunch.”

Jokingly, I said, “You went for blunch, not brunch.”

Little did I know that “blunch” is a legitimate English word and it perfectly described what I was trying to convey—an early lunch when you skip breakfast (whereas brunch, as I defined it, is a mid-morning meal that combines both breakfast and lunch).

Curious about my “new word,” I decided to look up “blunch.” A quick Google search revealed that, indeed, the word exists and means exactly what I thought it did. The term first appeared in the August 1, 1896, issue of Punch magazine, a British satirical publication, under the “Fashionable and Seasonable” section. “Blunch” was used alongside “brunch,” with a humorous note suggesting that to be fashionable, one must “brunch.”

From this experience, I concluded two things:

First, people think alike, even when separated by a century (or even 12,000 years, as shown in the Netflix series La Brea).

Second, in 1896, brunch/blunch was seen as lifestyle choice, but today, it’s become a lifestyle epidemic! But across the century, the sarcasm remains unchanged.