Fluffbuff

Last Monday we went to the first meeting of our Intro to linguistics class at UCLA. It was interesting and at one point things got quite funny. Our instructor — Natalie — was talking about affixes and mentioned infixes. I knew about prefixes and suffixes (or prepositions and postpositions), but never heard of infixes. It turns out that in English there is only one and all 17 of us in class tried to figure out what it was and came up empty handed.

It's "fuckin". As in un-fuckin-believable, but I can also think of abso-bloody-lutely, so perhaps Natalie was thinking of American English. Regardless, it's interesting to see that even in the case of words created outside of academia, people instinctively follow a system. "fuckin" gets inserted at a syllable boundary, usually just before the stressed syllable.

Now I really should go do my homework for tomorrow. Or maybe not… It's Sunday!