Place Names and Meaningful Infixing

Abstract

Infixing and interposing are relatively new derivational processes in English, first attested in the early twentieth century. For most of the last century, the insert in items like absofuckinglutely and no fucking way — in both cases, -fucking— carries no lexical meaning but serves as an “emotional stress amplifier” (McMillan 1980). However, I have found many late-twentieth-century infixings and interposings whose inserts are lexically meaningful and variously motivated, though they may also amplify emotional stress of a sort (Adams 2009, 127–44). For instance, in the animated short feature “Movie Night” (Chimendez 2005), one of the Cheat Commando Adventures, we encounter this conversational exchange: