transiences:andywooo:animeasuka:wafflesforstephanie:yosb:
welcome to harvard: linguistics 101
Is this reality?
Abso-fucking-lutely.
yo the word fucking is actually really interesting because it’s one of american english’s only infixes
YES THIS IS ACTUALLY REALLY COOL MY AP ENGLISH TEACHER WENT ON A 5-MINUTE RANT ABOUT “FUCK” AND HOW IT’S THE ONLY WORD YOU CAN INSERT INTO OTHER WORDS
I JUST HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS ABOUT THE WORD “FUCK” OKAY
This is actually really cool because technically “fuck” can’t even be an infix, as it’s a meaningful free morpheme and those can’t be used as grammatical morphemes (also in English infixes only exist in fossilized form) but the use of “fuck” for inflectional word formation is actually fascinating
As I see it, the more and more frequent use of a word as a suffix implies that it’s undergoing semantic bleaching
Soon, possibly not during our generation’s or our children’s or grandchildren’s lifespan, the word “fuck” may eventually lose its meaning and become a grammatical intensifying suffix or possibly the only actual inflix in the English language
and if you don’t think that’s at least kinda cool then I feel sorry for you son because linguistics is an amazing field of study and gdi I love the English language
Reblogging again for the commentary from the wonderful weresquirrel
i love this and i think it’s really interesting but i just need to give a shoutout to the word ‘bloody’ which i appreciate isn’t used this way in american english but in british english (and i think also in australian english but idk) ‘abso-bloody-lutely’ definitely happens. so ‘fuck’ isn’t actually the only word used like this but it’s interesting that the only examples of this are swears.
iampinbitch 