Have you brought gold? Have you brought silver to set me free?

[sovay]

This is the best comic I have ever seen about tmesis in the English language and also nearly identical to the example we were given in Latin III, except that instead of ridiculous the host word was unbelievable. It's an actual morphological rule; I believe in English it has to do with syllabic stress (in Latin, it's more strictly the splitting—τμῆσις—of a compound word). No one should have been surprised that it led to a brief fad of students saying unbelievfuckingable just to be difficult. Dr. Fiveash also spoke fondly of the emphatic possibilities of reduplication: unbe . . . believable, which I have never actually used in conversation no matter my level of incredulity, but I appreciate having been told in my junior year of high school that I could.

Comments

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

which is why one must practice their swearing...

[sovay]

which is why one must practice their swearing...

Truly, a misplaced infix is just embarrassing.

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

its when you dont repeat yourself in a rant, and still be creative.

I was in awe of people I worked with in the Navy, for their sheer audacity in their cussing. It flowed!

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

This really came out during the first draft of Motherfucking Pirates - the amount of time I spent just reading sentence after sentence to figure where I needed to place the fucks.

Yeah, there's nothing I can do to redeem that last sentence.

[sovay]

Yeah, there's nothing I can do to redeem that last sentence.

Apologize for nothing. When you write Motherfucking Pirates, there is no quarter given.

(Just a lot of fucks.)

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

That sentence actually looks like it belongs in a tumblr tag, where they talk about all the fucks not given, etc.