One topic that I literally cannot (LITâRALLY CANNOT) believe I forgot to mention in the swearing episode is fucking infixation.
What is fucking infixation? Glad you asked. Itâs a phenomenon in English where we put âfuckingâ (or âfreakingâ or âfrackingâ or whatever version you like best) inside another word. But before I can explain fucking infixation, I have to explain a few other things first.
Infixation is a type of morphological (= word-building) process where one word is interrupted by another element. Other languages have it more productively (they create lots of new words with infixes). English has prefixes and suffixes:
            prefix             suffix
     set vs.  re-set       cat vs. cat-s
PREfixes attach to the beginning of a word, SUFfixes attach to the end, and INfixes are exactly what they sound like: they attach inside a word.
Do any other languages have infixation? Yes, Tagalog does. For example, the infix -in- is inserted inside of a verb to make it past tense.
    present tense      past tense
    bili âbuyâ           b-in-ili âboughtâ
    basa âread (pres)â   b-in-asa âread (past)â
    sulat âwriteâ        s-in-ulat âwroteâ
(So then this is the equivalent of -ed in English. Imagine if we said b-ed-uy instead of âboughtâ.)
Fucking infixation involves the same thing: âfuckingâ is inserted inside another word.
     un-fucking-believable     de-fucking-licious     Ari-fucking-zona
(For those who are really interested: this is rule-based. You canât just insert fucking anygoddamnedwhere you like. It can only be inserted before the stressed syllable: for example, Arizo-fucking-na is not possible. Shit like this is why I love linguistics, btw.)
This is your #nerdfact of the day.
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