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...

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Mmm, tmesis. Along with zeugma and litotes, my favourite rhetorical figures. As much for the words, of course, as for their meanings - and of course for the fact that litotes and toilets are the only known anagrams of T S Eliot.

[zdenka]

Tmesis is fun. I too have fond memories of learning about Latin rhetorical devices in high school. After reading that infamous line in the Aeneid which has someone's skull being split open (cere . . . . somethingsomething . . . brum), I thought it was really neat and told my little brother about it. Later he asked me to look at a story he'd written, and it turned out to involve a battle scene in which the hero found his enemy with his sk split ull. It was really kind of adorable. (He did change it back to normal English after I'd seen it.)

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

When he asked "what in Heaven?" she made no reply,
Up her mind, and a dash for the door.

I love rhetoric.

Nine

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

The misplaced infixes are fascinating. So is the rule about stress that you have to stick the infix in before the stressed syllable? That works for "a whole nother" too, though as your Wikipedia says, sticking "whole" in at that point has more to do with parsing "another" as "a nother" instead of "an other" than it does with stresses, most likely.

I like the stress theory. It explains why you can't stick "fuck" into a word when the stress is on the first syllable and have it work. It'll work with "tremendous" but not with "masterful," although "masterfuckingful" is an entertaining misfire.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

English uses infixes so rarely that I am happy to see them under any circumstances, and that Wikipedia article's support of a-whole-nother under my own theory pleases me very much. (I mean, the alternative theory is "it's just wrong," so just about any linguist is going to be better than that, but negativity's what I see mostly.)

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Very nice. I'd not thought about tmesis since taking linguistics in college.