Punctuation and Grammar and Usage, Oh My! Part 3: Infixes

We all know what prefixes and suffixes are. They’re little word-pieces that you stick on to the front and back of larger word-pieces like legos to make other words, like dis-honest and un-car-ing. There are obvious prefixes and suffixes like those, where there’s a complete word in there that the prefix/suffix (I’m going to call them –fixes now) is just stuck to momentarily, and then there are –fixes that have melted into the word like gooey cheese and we don’t even notice that they’re not part of the root, like worth-y and in-de-fatig-able. (For more on stuff like this, check out a book on morphology.)

But did you know there is a word for this kind of language modification that comes in the middle of words, rather than at the front and back? Because there is and it is awesome. 

They’re called infixes. (Here are some fireworks to show you how excited these make me. There were fireworks in my brain when I found out about them. Okay, there were fireworks in my brain every single day of my Intro to English Language class. Even flipping through my notes makes me a little giddy. Fine, a lot giddy. Have some fireworks and stop making fun of me.)

But there aren’t very many infixes in the English language. They’re like the Forgotten Balder* of the –fixes. 

Italian has regular infixes. If you’re a musical person, you know that to go from loud to louder, you go from forte to fortissimo, and to go even louder than that, you go to fortississimo, and to go even louder you go fortissississimo, at which point you wonder if the composer was on crack. 

The only “regular” use of infixes in English is used with swear words. A bad day is unbefreakinlievable. Disconflippintinuous. Incanfreakindescent. Wheeeeee! 

And then there’s a random infix that is used only in speech: “another” may be divided into “a whole nother.” Sweet, right?? A whole nother. That’s a whole nother issue. We don’t do this with any other words (that I know of). How did you get to be so special, a whole nother? I love you. 

So give infixes your love and appreciation, or at least a hearty tip of the hat. Don’t treat them like Forgotten Balder. 

*Forgotten Balder is a meme based on the movie Thor. Basically, in Thor, Odin’s sons are Thor and Loki; but in the myths, Odin has a crapload of sons and Loki is not even one of them. So there’s this joke that Balder (or Baldur, or Baldr) is actually there in the movie mythos, but he’s just completely ignored. For extra hilarity, Balder in the Forgotten Balder meme is Liam Hemsworth, Chris Hemsworth’s (Thor’s) younger brother. I probably should not find Forgotten Balder as funny as I do.

Word(s) of the Day: Thank-you and Thank-you-ma'am

I’ve been wondering about what to do with the phrase “thank you” when it’s used as a noun (“a big thank you goes out to Bill”) or as an adjective (“I sent him a thank you card”) and, like any editor or writer should, I decided to check the all-powerful Merriam-Webster. 

This is what I found:

thank-you n [fr. the phrase thank you used in expressing gratitude] (1792): a polite expression of one’s gratitude

So, yes, “thank-you” is the correct form for a noun; and just to make myself feel better, I also checked the Corpus of Contemporary American English, which confirmed Webster’s. (Or I think it did. I am not very good at using COCA yet, but it is a super-cool resource.) Neither source said anything about the adjective form of “thank you,” but since it’s pretty standard to hyphenate two-part adjectives (like I just did there, ha!) then I think I’m safe to use “thank-you note.”

But the fun part comes next. When I looked up “thank-you,” I happened to glance at the entry below it, and this is what I found.

thank-you-ma’am n [prob. fr. its causing a nodding of the head] (1849): a bump or depression in a road; esp: a ridge or hollow made across a road on a hillside to cause water to run off

SWEET. New vocabulary word for the win. I love the dictionary. 

Have you come across any awesome new words lately?

Keep on Going!

You've probably already seen this (I'm totally late to the party), but if you haven't, you ought to watch it. This is Neil Gaiman's commencement address at the University of the Arts graduation ceremony. 

There's a LOT to be learned from this speech, but here's what I took away this time:

Writing is hard sometimes. I'm behind on my word count for JulNoWriMo (already?? Yes, already) and I'm frustrated with my novel and ready to chuck it against a wall. Metaphorically. Otherwise I'd have to print it out first, no thank you. So many aspects are just not working the way I want them to, and sitting down to write feels like a wrestling match, with tears and sweat and injuries and waaaay too much spandex and the feeling of creeping horror that I've grabbed onto something I would have preferred never to grab.

But even though I sometimes hate writing, I never regret having written. Even the total flops, the utter trash, the stuff I will never ever show to another person simply out of compassion for my fellow human beings, all of that was worth my time because it taught me something. I learned what kind of stories sounded fun but were actually hard to execute, or how not to write dialogue, or how to pace scenes.

So even though I'm in a novel-chucking phase right now, I'm going to keep working. Somehow, it will all turn out for the best.

What helps you keep writing when the going gets tough?

It's WriMo Time!

If you haven’t heard of NaNoWriMo, it probably sounds like something weird involving rhinos, so lemme splain. It stands for National Novel Writing Month, an event held every year where writers commit to completing a 50,000-word novel in the month of November. I’ve participated six times and it’s a crazy ride full of angst and excitement and freakouts and crappy writing and incandescent moments of the pure joy of noveling.

It's also my magic feather. Outside of NaNoWriMo, I’ve yet to finish a novel. (There was a completed novella in eighth grade, but we do not speak of it. It is an ancient creature we spiders fear above all others.)

This is a problem since I’m trying to finish a novel now, and it’s really really hard to motivate myself without the camaraderie provided by legions of other writers doing the same thing at the same time.

Luckily, there are other events similar to NaNo that run throughout the year. One that I’ve known about for a while is JulyNoWriMo. It has the same rules as NaNo except that writers can work on existing projects instead of having to start new ones.

This is perfect for me, because I’ve been waffling about my current manuscript for months now. I like the story, but, like a kid on a sugar-high or a crow with shiny objects, I am both obsessive and distractible, and I’ve had a lot of distractions to obsess over lately. So while I’ve been pouring my creativity into a purely self-indulgent story that will definitely never be published (fondly called Not My Novel or my Not-Novel) and spending hours exploring the Avengers tag on tumblr (do not get me started on my newfound love of Marvel. This is for your safety), my steadfast little novel has waited patiently with a hang-dog expression for me to come back and give it the love it deserves. 

If I continue as I am, floundering around and generally being as gung-ho and proactive as Sleeping Beauty, then this novel will end up as sadly abandoned as my last, I’ll lose the chance to work on a really fun idea, and it’s possible that my best friend Sarah Allen will pester me to death.  

So NO MORE, I say. I refuse to surrender to the complexities of the icky middles! I will overcome my inability to write subplot! I will conquer this sucker or I will die trying.

So yes, I’ve joined JulyNoWriMo, and I’ll be writing 50,000 words this month, and holy carp-yes-the-fish am I terrified, but it is going to be AWESOME, and if you find me weeping quietly in a corner, you now understand why.