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There are some words that I can’t
use in this video.

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Partly because I try not to swear on camera,

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and partly because I want these videos to
be suitable for everyone,

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no matter how conservative
your views on language are.

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Or how conservative your parents’ views
on language are.

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Fortunately, I am British, so there’s a
word that I can use instead:

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Bloody.

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“Bloody” used to be a taboo word,
it used to cause great offence,

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and there’s no actual consensus
as to why.

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But these days, it’s been classified as
“generally of little concern”

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by the UK’s broadcasting regulator,

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so I’m going to assume
I can get away with it.

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But before we get to that part
of the bloody video,

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we have to talk about something that high school
English class probably didn’t teach you.

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Prefixes fit on the start of words.

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And suffixes fit on the end of words.

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And that’s about as far as most people get
in school.

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These little atoms of language,

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these bits of meaning that can’t be split
any further,

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are called morphemes:
we’ve talked about those before.

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And when a morpheme is used like this,
it’s called an affix.

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But affixes aren’t just prefixes and suffixes:
there are also infixes,

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morphemes that slot into the middle of a word.

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And it is very awkward for an English teacher
to talk about infixes.

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In some other languages,
it would be much easier.

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In Khmer, for example, there’s an infix
that shows causation.

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So slap in Khmer means “to die”,

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but samlap means “to kill”, or “to cause
to die”.

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It’s complicated than that, of course,

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but that’s a good simple example
for English speakers.

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Proto-Indo-European,
the reconstructed ancient language

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that’s the common ancestor of most languages
between Iceland and India,

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Proto-Indo-European almost certainly included
a nasal infix:

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in English, a few millennia later,

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there is evidence of that in
one irregular verb:

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it’s the difference between “stood”
and “stand”.

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But modern English doesn’t have infixes.

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Unless you count one language feature that
school kids would

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very much enjoy playing around with:
expletive infixation.

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Now, "expletive", in linguistic terms,

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usually means a word that’s not conveying
any meaning itself,

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but which helps with some other goal in a
sentence,

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like being a dummy subject.

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So in “it rained”, what’s “it”?

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The world? The sky?
It doesn’t matter,

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“it” in that sentence is an expletive,

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it just means we don’t have to point at
the window and go “Raining!”.

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But “expletive” also has another meaning
for non-linguists: a curse word.

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And that’s what we’re talking about here.

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Expletive infixation means sticking a curse
word inside another word, to add emphasis,

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which is fan-f… -bloody-tastic.

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Yes, this is a genuine linguistics thing,
there are papers written about it,

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because it's not a free-for-all:

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English speakers have some rules and patterns
that we generally stick to.

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First rule: You can’t just use any word,

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or even any curse word, as an infix.

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The words that can systematically be used
like this are expletives that can already

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be used at almost any point in a sentence,

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words that were wonderfully described as
"fornicatives and theo-imprecatives":

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in short, it’s usually about sex, or
it’s about asking god to damn someone.

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Or they’re words derived from those originals:
so "fricking", "flipping", "goshdarn".

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There are certainly instances where entirely
different words could be used:

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you can put a huge number of curses in the
middle of “abso-bloody-lutely”

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and it’ll sound okay because we’re so
used to that construction.

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If you like, pause the video now,
and try out a few of them.

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Out loud. Shout them.

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Just to help you deal with
the state of the world.

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But there are a few more common words that
are used for this.

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In a 1980 article, James McMillan connected
expletive infixation to what he called "interposing,"

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which is "the interruption of any
tight syntactic phrase".

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So that’d be "Mount St friggin’ Helens,"
"of bloody course," or "Isaac god-damn Newton."

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These interposing words can occupy spaces
that no other part of speech can,

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they break the rules that we’re taught,

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and it turns out you can extend that to even
interrupting in the middle of single words.

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So that’s the words you can use.

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Second rule: you can’t stick an expletive
infix anywhere in a word.

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There is some disagreement among phonologists
about the exact details of where they can fit,

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but there’s a general agreement that the
infix has to go before a stressed syllable,

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and not break a morpheme in two.

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So "im-bloody-POSSible" and
"disa-bloody-GREEable" are fine.

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But put the infix before an unstressed syllable
and you get

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"imPOSS-bloody-ible,"

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"imPOSSi-bloody-ble,"

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or "disaGREEa-bloody-ble."

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Which all sound terrible.

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And the thing that's so interesting about
that construction:

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seeing as it's usually taboo,

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you were likely never taught how to use
any of those in school by an English teacher.

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But you knew how it works anyway.

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The way we learn the rules of language without
being "taught" them traditionally

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is in-f-- bloody-credible.

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Thank you to my co-authors,
Molly Ruhl and Gretchen McCulloch,

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Gretchen has a podcast called Lingthusiasm
that it well worth a listen,

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there's a link in the description.