Infix is Just Another Word for Fanfreakintastic (Minicast)

It’s another minicast from A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

What’s the one word that comes to mind when you hear the name J.D. Salinger? Masterpiece? Recluse? How about the F word?

I ask because we had a call recently from a listener named Mark. Mark is a journalism teacher in Indianapolis, and recently he’d read an article in a journalism blog called What J.D. Salinger Taught Me About Literary Use of the F-Word.

That article, in turn, prompted a conversation with a colleague about a couple of linguistic terms describing how the F-word is sometimes used. Now, one of those terms is infix. The other is temesis. That’s T-M-E-S-I-S, temesis. Both of them are pretty close in meaning. They have to do with splitting a word and sticking in at least one extra syllable.

So instead of hi-ho, you say hi-diddle-y-ho or fan-freakintastic. Of course, you can also insert the F word in there, right? Now, Mark called because he and his colleague wanted to learn more about these linguistic terms and the differences between them.

First, we asked Mark what examples he’d heard. Here’s what he told us. One was the British use of bloody. How they might say abso-bloody-lutely. Right. Or we might say abso-effing-lutely. Right.

Another was, oddly enough, a character on The Simpsons, Ned Flanders, will say, like, diddly in the middle of a word. High diddly-ho or something like that, right? Yeah, yeah. Things like that. Okey-diddly-dokey. Yeah, yeah. Super diddly-dooper.

But we didn’t really come up with any actual words, just kind of goofy little sounds almost that are used that way. Well, bloody, bloody is a word, but you’re right. It’s not very American or North American even to do that. And so your question is what, Mark?

Well, we were kind of debating, you know, actually what is an infix, whether when it’s used like that is an infix or a temesis. And then are there other words? So there was kind of a debate whether an infix was actually the word used like that or whether it was like adding an S to like mother-in-law to make it mother’s-in-law.

Yeah, there’s a difference between infixing and temesis, and actually there’s a third word, diacope, D-I-A-C-O-P-E. It’s more old-fashioned. It’s a Latin word. And it’s more or less the same as temesis. The difference is so varied that I don’t think that the experts even agree on it.

If you can look in any number of books about linguistics and language and find that they tend to broadly define it so they don’t get in trouble by overdefining and being too precise in their definition. But generally, infixing is about one word being inserted inside another word. Temesis is often about one word being inserted inside another compound word.

So you might say a, what’s a great example of that? First effing prize. So first prize is kind of a compound. You start effing in there, and that’s our euphemism for the F word. And then you’ve got a really good example of thamesis. But again, these definitions tend to be vague. They tend to be defined differently by different authorities.

And in general, they’re all about inserting some sound, some word or some syllable in a place that it didn’t used to go or doesn’t ordinarily belong. I see people do this just for fun, like with edumacation. There we go. Yeah.

There are a number of examples for that exact syllable, the ma sound being inserted in other words and usually to indicate some kind of pretending to be ignorant is how it goes. But the rest of them, it’s really interesting. They’re mostly about emphasis and mostly very slangy, so bloody and damn and effing or frigging or freaking and so on and so forth.

Interestingly enough, infixing is more common in other languages than it is in English. English doesn’t use it very much at all. Did you guys do a show on a whole nother? Because that was another example I thought of. I’ve heard people say a whole nother and whether whole stuck in there would be another example of it.

Yeah, that one’s a sticking, there’s a sticking point with that is that some authorities believe that another is legitimately a word on its own. And so maybe it isn’t actually any kind of infixing or two-neces happening there. Right, that’s a whole other example.

Yeah, so it’s a dangerous one. But abso-bloody-lutely is a great example of it. I guarantee you is a great example of it as well. Really interesting stuff. You’ll find that it’s a great marker of some of the best literature that uses American colloquial speech.

If you’re reading really good writing and they’re doing really good regional accents or regional dialect, then they tend to use this properly because it’s characteristic of a register of language that’s really, it’s very informal. But it’s about, how shall I put this, constantly exaggerating or understating in order to make an effect.

There’s a kind of language that we Americans have in particular, Australians have in big doses as well, where we overstate and understate in order to make a point. And infixing goes right along with that. So, Mark, does that help?

That does. Oh, we’re abso. Never mind. We’re glad you called. Thank you very much. One of my favorite ones is from a 1979 article about the Super Bowl, and it’s a la damn bamba. I’m going to a la damn bamba. This is like five slamma jamma. Something like that. You remember that basketball team?

Yeah, and there are some that are kind of like on the fence, absuppositly. Oh, I used to say that all the time. I thought I made it up. Oh, I hate when that happens. But hey, I do want to say one more thing about the word temesis. It comes from a Greek root that means to cut.

And in fact, temesis is an etymological relative of all those otomy suffixes that have to do with cutting, like lobotomy. And it’s related to the word anatomy, which comes from Greek words that literally mean all cut up. And here’s something really great. You see this same cutting root in the word atom.

Now the prefix there, a, means not. And because the ancient Greeks thought the unit known as an atom was not cuttable, they put those two words together. Atom means not cuttable. Of course, we’ve since found out, for better or for worse, that the ancient Greeks were wrong about that.

Anyway, if you have a question or a comment about language, it’d be fan-freakantastic to hear from you. You can email us at words@waywordradio.org or leave us a message on our anytime language line. That’s 1-877-929-9673. That’s all for this week. Thanks for listening.

For A Way with Words, I’m Martha Barnette. Support for A Way with Words is provided by Mozy Pro Online Backup. Mozy Pro protects your business’s data with simple, secure, and affordable backup solutions. Find out more at mosey.com slash words.