From New Radicals to James Joyce

"Frenemies who when you're down ain't your friend..."
New Radicals, You get what you give

Today is a special day in my country, is the Friends' Day, I started this day with a funny movie "Click" with my best friends, everybody had seen it years ago. In the movie sounds a song when Adam Sandler's character get a new opportunity to be a good man and to have a happy life. The song is quoted above, when I was singing the lyrics I noted that it said: 'frenemies'. What is a frenemy? With wikihelp I found that is a portmanteau of 'friend' and 'enemy'. What is a portmanteau? A contraction of two words in one. It's very common in English but I think it's a habit that can produce a lot of misunderstandings. A book with many portmanteaux is Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce. Now I understand why people say if you aren't an English speaker you can't understand this book.

Examples of portmanteaux:

Brunch = breakfast + lunch
Motel = motor + hotel
Smog = smoke + fog

You can associate words friendly but maybe you can't understand some relations directly as shopaholic = shop + [alco]-holic (for extension, addicted), because there is a change of the meaning of morphemes. For this reason I think the portmanteaux are frenemies.