The English language is full of weird, unofficial rules that dictate certain grammatical changes for seemingly arbitrary reasons other than "it just feels right."
Consider: inserting the word "fuck" into another word for emphasis.
The Language Nerds have a great new blog post, where they look into this phenomenon that they call "expletive infixation."
One of these precise and fine-tuned rules is one called expletive infixation. How often do you hear people say un-fucking-believable, or abso-bloody-lutely? How about Phila-fucking-delphia? As you can see, this is a process whereby a profane word, such as fucking, bloody, freaking, etc, is shoved into another word for intensification. You'd think at first glance that this is probably random; you just go ahead and insert the word somewhere. Well, no! It turns out that this process is not random and is incredibly rule-governed, systematic, and precise.
Take a look at the following examples:
Fantastic: *fanta-fucking-stick.
Absolutely: *Ab-fucking-solutely
Independent: *Indep-fucking-endent.Something sounds horribly wrong about the examples above, right?
It's a short post, with a succinct explanation, but it is also sufficiently de-fucking-lightful.
F***ing Insertion is Systematic, And This Is How It Works. [The Language Nerds]
Image: Loozer Boy / Flickr
