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

[sovay]

So is the rule about stress that you have to stick the infix in before the stressed syllable?

I believe so, although I'd hazard there's a qualifier that if it makes a hash of morphological boundaries in the process, a native English-speaker will find somewhere else to throw it. I think one of the reasons unbelievfuckingable sounds wrong is that even without an explicit knowledge of adjectival formation, the listener notices that the expletive has been dropped between the stem and the suffix of the adjective (believ-able), which should really be one unit. Unfuckingbelievable is simple because it's just splitting the adjective and its negation, but even if the infix is postponed a syllable on from the privative un-, the core sense of the word is preserved when it picks back up again after the expletive. [F]uckingable is meaningless in a way that even the truncated -lievable isn't. I feel there should be a lot more technical language in this post, but I would have to go looking for it right now.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

No no, I like it just the way you have it, with a minimum of technical language. I'm very sure you're right and that there are specialized terms for most of the things you've described, but I like that everyday language got the meaning across, and I suspect I understand better for there *not* being specialized terms.