What's the one word that comes to mind when you hear the name J. D. Salinger? Masterpiece? Recluse? How about the F-word?
An Indianapolis listener came across an article about Salinger's use of that word, and that got him wondering about the linguistic term, infix, for inserting at least one extra syllable into a word to make it more emphatic.
Released August 3, 2011.
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Photo by Brent Moore. Used under a Creative Commons license.
This is a very interesting topic. I enjoyed listening.
I had also read in linguistic literature [Stonham and Katamba 2006: 45] that infixing is rare in English. However, the examples I had come across, left me pondering about their meaning. To be more precise, I did not catch the meaning of the words kanga-bloody-roo (from kangaroo), guaran-friggin-tee ( from guarantee), Kalama-goddamn-zoo (from Kalamazoo).
I got it that that people do this for fun sometimes and it is characteristic to informal register, but why the words having infixes are not mostly registered in dictionaries? Isn't slang or a word, belonging to colloquial speech, registered in dictionaries. I suppose they are. Then, why does not an infixed word get a strong foothold in the language?
R. Barthes in Elements of Semiology [1964] remarkably writes:
" there is no language without speech, and no speech outside language. ...... a language is at the same time the instrument and the product of speech ..... Nothing enters the language without having been tried in speech, but conversely no speech is possible (that is fulfills its function of communication) if it is not drawn from the 'treasure' of the language."
Perhaps infixed words have not been tried enough in speech to get a strong foothold in the treasure of the language.
Because the words themselves that can be made from the infix are infinite. Its the same reason dictionaries don't include every form of a word that can be made with prefixes and suffixes. The "un-" words alone would be hundreds of pages, or more.
Instead, dictionaries define the affixes — prefixes, infixes, and suffixes — and then let you, the reader, look up the individual parts of the word.
That's how our instinctive understanding of morphology works, too. Once we begin to automatically understand English's few common infixes, we're able to parse and understand any word that contains them.
If the number of words made from the infix (or any affix) is infinite, then it comes to prove that English lexicon is open-ended.
The English language does not cease to surprise us. It has high productivity and creativity.