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
My Japanese professor talked about this once. He was saying that infixing was not very popular in English and was slightly more common in Japanese, but was not unknown in English and when we just stared at him, not comprehending, he said, “You know, in-fucking-fixing.”
(Also, the Pennsylvanian in me hastens to add that the ‘fucking’ is in the wrong place. Anyone else who has had the misfortune to be trapped here will tell you it’s Pennsyl-fucking-vania.)
(OH, it looks like maybe they’re comparing the right and wrong way to do it, I couldn’t see it well before. Good, good. We’re okay now.)