Scrabble Champion – or – Let’s make it complicated – or – If you keep playing with the language, you’ll go blind.

I have an amateur interest in Linguistics (insert obligatory “cunning” joke here), and recently ran across a nifty new term: “Tmesis.” This is the act of dropping a word in the middle of another word, as in “abso-fuckin’-lutely.” Tmesis is a form of another fun word: “infixation,” and the example I used is defined specifically as an “expletive infixation.”

There are other examples. Hip Hop culture provides “hizzouse” and “shiznit,” while many people joke about being “edumacated.”

What’s interesting to me is the fact that linguists, who actually get paid for things like this, have argued over what determines where the insertion is placed. Many seem to subscribe to the theory that the insertion occurs before the primary stressed syllable, while others insist a morpheme boundary takes precedence. Yet another camp swears up and down that it’s all a matter of prosody, where “the metrical stress tree of the host is minimally restructured to accommodate the stress tree of the infix."

For what it’s worth, the third is the theory I subscribe to. As was pointed out, “unbelievable” and “irresponsible” have the same stress patterns, and the first syllable of each is a separate morpheme, but the infixation occurs in two different places, i.e. “un-fucking-believable” and “irre-fucking-sponsible.” The resulting rhythms just sound more natural, which is what prosody is all about.

Prosody is the rhythms, stresses, and intonations of spoken language. It can indicate if a sentence is a statement or question, the emotional state of the speaker, or – most important to me – sarcasm. Users of sign language have their own form of prosody, using length of gesture, tension of limbs, and of course, facial expressions to achieve the same effect. I think that’s cool. Emoticons are an orthographic convention (writin’) used to convey prosody, as are boring old punctuation marks such as commas, ellipses, and the wonderfully-named “scare quotes” – the quotation marks that are used specifically to cause doubt about the truthfulness of a specific word or phrase, as in: We’ve heard all we need to about your “solution.”

And since I can’t think of a clever way to end this post, I’ll just quote an expletive infixation from one of my all-time favorite movies, Boondock Saints: “I’d say that makes him a lia-fuckin’-bility.”