An infix in an AFL headline about Hawthorn

A reader has just sent me a screenshot of a headline on the AFL (Australian Football League) site.

She knew I'd be interested in the infix in the middle of the word unbelievable, because I've posted previously about these additions within words.

Rachel Spack Koch, the moderator of Azar Grammar Exchange, after giving examples of infixes in English, concludes:

So, an infix is a letter, a syllable, or a word - sometimes invented - to put inside a word either to logically explain it, to add a a tone to it, or to encode it.

To my ear, the headline would sound better as unbe-buddy-lievable, and I wondered why. I had a brief look at a paper discussing the way in which infixes are used in English and discovered the inserted word should lie to the left of a stressed syllable, and doesn't occur traditionally before a reduced vowel.

However, as it stands it does the job, celebrating Lance Franklin's thirteen goals this afternoon against North Melbourne. 

 Go Hawks!

a good nother idea

I'm still on the trail of the new word nother. Recently my sister said, 'That'll weigh a good nother kilo, I reckon'.

Okay... now I've heard a different word than whole inserted between an and other.

So now I think maybe our brains are processing the expression as one word rather than as a phrase. Maybe it's the word another with an infix in it.

When I looked up infix in the Merriam Webster online, I was surprised to discover it can be a transitive verb or an adjective as well as a noun. However, it seems as if we don't use infixes much in English compared to other languages.

prefixes, suffixes and infixes - and arpy darpy

When I posted about the use of bloody as a highly informal insertion into Australian English words, I didn't know this form of expression is called an infix, until Anonymous commented on the post.

Since then I've discovered that this particular infix is a FREE morpheme (smallest unit of meaning) because it can also operate as a stand-alone word - that is, it can move freely within a sentence without being part of another word.

I've been told about blooming, which can operate in the same way, but has more of a British English tone.

And, just now, I was browsing HyperTextBooks and saw a mention of damn used in the same way - fan-damn-tastic - though I must say the particular example doesn't roll off my tongue as smoothly as our Aussie expression does.

But, best of all , I suddenly remembered arp-language! When I was young I could speak it quickly and fluently, but now I have trouble even remembering how it worked. But I think it involved inserting arp - an infix! surely an infix! - before any vowel that was sounded. For instance, bottle would be barpottle and camera would be carpamarperarpa. Or maybe it would have been carpamarpra, because we pronounced it camra.

A Wikipedia entry calls this language game Arpy-Darpy and says it is spoken in New Zealand. Well, I can attest that it has been spoken in Australia, though I don't know if anyone plays with it now. We called it Arp-language.