There are some words that I can’t
use in this video.
Partly because I try not to swear on camera,
and partly because I want these videos to
be suitable for everyone,
no matter how conservative
your views on language are.
Or how conservative your parents’ views
on language are.
Fortunately, I am British, so there’s a
word that I can use instead:
Bloody.
“Bloody” used to be a taboo word,
it used to cause great offence,
and there’s no actual consensus
as to why.
But these days, it’s been classified as
“generally of little concern”
by the UK’s broadcasting regulator,
so I’m going to assume
I can get away with it.
But before we get to that part
of the bloody video,
we have to talk about something that high school
English class probably didn’t teach you.
Prefixes fit on the start of words.
And suffixes fit on the end of words.
And that’s about as far as most people get
in school.
These little atoms of language,
these bits of meaning that can’t be split
any further,
are called morphemes:
we’ve talked about those before.
And when a morpheme is used like this,
it’s called an affix.
But affixes aren’t just prefixes and suffixes:
there are also infixes,
morphemes that slot into the middle of a word.
And it is very awkward for an English teacher
to talk about infixes.
In some other languages,
it would be much easier.
In Khmer, for example, there’s an infix
that shows causation.
So slap in Khmer means “to die”,
but samlap means “to kill”, or “to cause
to die”.
It’s complicated than that, of course,
but that’s a good simple example
for English speakers.
Proto-Indo-European,
the reconstructed ancient language
that’s the common ancestor of most languages
between Iceland and India,
Proto-Indo-European almost certainly included
a nasal infix:
in English, a few millennia later,
there is evidence of that in
one irregular verb:
it’s the difference between “stood”
and “stand”.
But modern English doesn’t have infixes.
Unless you count one language feature that
school kids would
very much enjoy playing around with:
expletive infixation.
Now, "expletive", in linguistic terms,
usually means a word that’s not conveying
any meaning itself,
but which helps with some other goal in a
sentence,
like being a dummy subject.
So in “it rained”, what’s “it”?
The world? The sky?
It doesn’t matter,
“it” in that sentence is an expletive,
it just means we don’t have to point at
the window and go “Raining!”.
But “expletive” also has another meaning
for non-linguists: a curse word.
And that’s what we’re talking about here.
Expletive infixation means sticking a curse
word inside another word, to add emphasis,
which is fan-f… -bloody-tastic.
Yes, this is a genuine linguistics thing,
there are papers written about it,
because it's not a free-for-all:
English speakers have some rules and patterns
that we generally stick to.
First rule: You can’t just use any word,
or even any curse word, as an infix.
The words that can systematically be used
like this are expletives that can already
be used at almost any point in a sentence,
words that were wonderfully described as
"fornicatives and theo-imprecatives":
in short, it’s usually about sex, or
it’s about asking god to damn someone.
Or they’re words derived from those originals:
so "fricking", "flipping", "goshdarn".
There are certainly instances where entirely
different words could be used:
you can put a huge number of curses in the
middle of “abso-bloody-lutely”
and it’ll sound okay because we’re so
used to that construction.
If you like, pause the video now,
and try out a few of them.
Out loud. Shout them.
Just to help you deal with
the state of the world.
But there are a few more common words that
are used for this.
In a 1980 article, James McMillan connected
expletive infixation to what he called "interposing,"
which is "the interruption of any
tight syntactic phrase".
So that’d be "Mount St friggin’ Helens,"
"of bloody course," or "Isaac god-damn Newton."
These interposing words can occupy spaces
that no other part of speech can,
they break the rules that we’re taught,
and it turns out you can extend that to even
interrupting in the middle of single words.
So that’s the words you can use.
Second rule: you can’t stick an expletive
infix anywhere in a word.
There is some disagreement among phonologists
about the exact details of where they can fit,
but there’s a general agreement that the
infix has to go before a stressed syllable,
and not break a morpheme in two.
So "im-bloody-POSSible" and
"disa-bloody-GREEable" are fine.
But put the infix before an unstressed syllable
and you get
"imPOSS-bloody-ible,"
"imPOSSi-bloody-ble,"
or "disaGREEa-bloody-ble."
Which all sound terrible.
And the thing that's so interesting about
that construction:
seeing as it's usually taboo,
you were likely never taught how to use
any of those in school by an English teacher.
But you knew how it works anyway.
The way we learn the rules of language without
being "taught" them traditionally
is in-f-- bloody-credible.
Thank you to my co-authors,
Molly Ruhl and Gretchen McCulloch,
Gretchen has a podcast called Lingthusiasm
that it well worth a listen,
there's a link in the description.
