A great fucking explanation of expletive in-fucking-sertion

The English language is full of weird, unofficial rules that dictate certain grammatical changes for seemingly arbitrary reasons other than "it just feels right."

Consider: inserting the word "fuck" into another word for emphasis.

The Language Nerds have a great new blog post, where they look into this phenomenon that they call "expletive infixation."

One of these precise and fine-tuned rules is one calledexpletive infixation. How often do you hear people sayun-fucking-believable, orabso-bloody-lutely? How aboutPhila-fucking-delphia? As you can see, this is a process whereby a profane word, such asfucking,bloody,freaking, etc, is shoved into another word for intensification. You'd think at first glance that this is probably random; you just go ahead and insert the word somewhere. Well, no! It turns out that this process is not random and is incredibly rule-governed, systematic, and precise.

Take a look at the following examples:Fantastic:*fanta-fucking-stick.Absolutely: *Ab-fucking-solutelyIndependent: *Indep-fucking-endent.

Something sounds horribly wrong about the examples above, right?

It's a short post, with a succinct explanation, but it is also sufficiently de-fucking-lightful.

F***ing Insertion is Systematic, And This Is How It Works. [The Language Nerds]

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