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Do I Use Expletive Infixes? Abso-Bloody-Lutely!

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The 'Bloody' in the title is an example of an expletive infix—a swear-word (or a euphemism for a swear-word, such as bally or blessed etc.) inserted in another word, to convey mild sarcasm, humour, or simply emphasis.

Abso-bloody-lutely and its many variants are some of the commonest examples but there are plenty of others, such as fan-bloody-tastic, un-sodding-believable, re-fucking-diculous and so on.

It seems a relatively modern linguistic innovation. Green’s Dictionary of Slang is a gold-bloody-mine  of early occurrences using absolutely, but the earliest are from around the 1890s and the popularity grew in the early 20th century.

Although new example using expletive infixes can be coined at will by any speaker, they have to follow certain rules. These have been and still are the subject of discussion amongst linguists but in simple terms we can say the infix must come immediately before a stressed syllable. 

So for instance, if our base word is 'overthinking', we can say 

over-bloody-thinking

but

overthink-bloody-ing

is impossible.

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