I was searching for a word meaning: to insert one word within another for emphasis, like absofuckinglutuly (pardon my German) or any number of the things Ned Flanders form the Simpsons says.
Who’s got it?
Hi-diddley-ho. Check out the following site for more Greek terminology:
The Forest of Rhetoric
Tmesis is also a grammatical term. It refers to languages like Greek, Sanskrit, and German where verbs and their bound particles can be separated. From the Greek root meaning cut as in entomos 'insect'.
BY that Forest of Rhetoric is awesome. I've visited that page before and I always end up spending a long time browsing there. Tonight I learned that "
dialysis" is a rhetorical term:
dialysis
di-al'-i-sis from Gk. dia, "through," "asunder"
and lyein, "to loose"
Also sp. dialisis
divisio
the dismembrer
(1) To spell out alternatives, or to present either-or arguments that lead to a conclusion.
(2) A synonym for asyndeton.
Getting back to the subject, here's my meager trow onto the pitch:
Just when I thought that establishing the etymology of this term would be a sticky wicket, sticky wicket's origins were made clear.
But isn't an infix a bound morpheme (like prefixes and suffixes) instead of a freestanding word?
No examples come to mind right now, but I think infixation refers to adding a marker (such as "-ly" for adverb, "in-" for negative) in the middle of a word instead of at the beginning or end of it.
The Loos
Glossary of linguistic terms lists an
infix as a type of
affix, and says that an affix is a
bound morpheme but lists "bloomin" as an example of an infix in "abso-bloomin'-lutely."