#infixation

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?

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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Series: Morphology -- the little ugly sister of syntax

You’ve probably heard this. ”A 5K is tough, but a marathon is a whole nother thing.” On the surface it looks like a case of infixation: a-whole-nother, emphasizing the otherness of the other thing. How different is a marathon from a 5K? It’s so different as to be not just another thing, but a whole nother thing.

Is this really infixation? Can you replace the “whole” with something else? A-fucking-nother? I don’t know, maybe. It sounds kind of weird to me.

But what if you look at it as rebracketing instead? Why would it be “a whole nother" instead of "an whole other”? Well, we only use “an” before words that begin with a vowel, which “whole” doesn’t. So while it works to form “another” from “an other” (which is where it did come from in the 13th century), sticking a consonant-initial word like “whole” in there breaks up the pattern. So “an whole other” doesn’t work.

Meanwhile, “a whole other" doesn’t appear to violate any phonetic rules, but if there were anything inherently better about "a whole other" instead of "a whole nother," we’d expect people to be using that and not "a whole nother," but instead we get "a whole nother" going around.

Truthfully, said phonetic rule is entirely arbitrary. The word “an" is just a worn-down form of "one,” and “a" is a form that got worn down even further, leaving the ‘n’ before a vowel. This resulted in the ‘n’ getting shuffled around a lot. A word like "apron" was originally "napron,” and over time “a napron" became "an apron,” a rebracketing as alluded to above (“a [napron]” —> “a[n apron]”).

So, I think something similar is going on with “a whole nother.” The base word “another,” originally “an other,” is getting reanalyzed/rebracketed as “a nother,” and the adjective “whole” is being inserted. Since we don’t yet consider “nother” to be a word, this looks like infixation. The rebracketing, however, seems to be triggered in this case by the intent to insert the adjective, which begins with a consonant and can’t take “an.”

So, is this infixation or rebracketing or both? How could we answer this? Build a time machine, go forward a hundred years, and see if “nother” has replaced “other” in future English. If no, then “a whole nother” is just an odd case of infixation. If yes, then there’s some rebracketing and reanalysis of “another” going on.