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, lots do, including Tagalog. 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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