#infixation

Abso-b████y-lutely: Expletive Infixation

There are rules in the English language that you've probably never been taught, but you know anyway: how to split apart words with "infixes". But you've never been taught it because some of those infixes are words you probably shouldn't use in front of your high school English teachers...

It’s a new Language Files video with me, Tom Scott, and Molly Ruhl! For more linguistics of swearing, check out the following Lingthusiasm episodes: 

Real swear words and pseudo-swears

One topic that I literally cannot (LIT’RALLY CANNOT) believe I forgot to mention in the swearing episode is fucking infixation.

What is fucking infixation? Glad you asked. It’s a phenomenon in English where we put ‘fucking’ (or ‘freaking’ or ‘fracking’ 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 ‘buy’                    b-in-ili ‘bought’

        basa ‘read (pres)’     b-in-asa ‘read (past)’

        sulat ‘write’              s-in-ulat ‘wrote’

(So then this is the equivalent of -ed in English. Imagine if we said b-ed-uy instead of ‘bought’.)

Fucking infixation involves the same thing: ‘fucking’ 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 can’t 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.

Carrie

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Cheer-damnably-ho! 

You’re receiving this broadcast on a small, portable, battery powered radio. They’re not going to all be creative, folks. The radios have been brought to you by Conevilience Radios. Um… Is that supposed to be an infixation of Evil into convenience? That is terrible. I’m starting to wonder if they have any creativity at all at this company. Conevilience. Conevilience. It doesn’t even sound good. What the fuck, guys?

Series: Morphology -- the little ugly sister of syntax