Infixation in English?

English doesn’t have any productive processes of infixation, but there’s one marginal process that comes close, which is affectionately referred to by morphologists as “fu**in’ infixation.” In colloquial spoken English, we will often take our favorite taboo word or expletive – in American English fu**ing, goddam, or frigging, in British English bloody – and insert it into a base word:

abso-fu**in-lutely

fan-bloody-tastic

Ala-friggin’-bama

This kind of infixation is used to emphasize a word, to make it stronger.

What’s particularly interesting is that we can’t insert fu**in just anywhere in a word. In other words, there are phonological restrictions on the insertion of expletives. Try inserting your favorite expletive into the following words:

Winnepesaukee

elementary

onomatopoeia

Now think of some other words, and try to infix fu**in’. Can you begin to see a pattern to where the expletive is inserted?

Can you figure out what conditions the placement of the expletive?