Daily affirmations of a word mercenary
- Previous: SXSW: saturation point
- Next: Favorite SXSW Moments
- Tags: dictionary, language, words
2 Responses to “tmesis”
Leave a reply
Hey there. I'm Ariel Meadow Stallings, a native Seattleite who's written my way up and down the Left Coast. Electrolicious is where I post daily randomata, but I also write for a living. My first book, Offbeat Bride, was published last year.
You're reading a page from the archives. Check the homepage for current content.
ken
March 12th, 2008 at 6:36 am
Hey - that’s my favor-abso-fuckin’-lutely-ite word!
Sean Shannon
March 14th, 2008 at 9:42 am
Actually, I think tmesis only refers to when the word is inserted as a separate word (as in “be *thou* ware”). When the word that is inserted becomes part of a single word like absofuckinglutely, that’s called an infix.
(One of my linguistics profs at UToledo actually did her dissertation on how the only infixes in English are curse words. She was one of the cool ones.)