Term for inserting a word into a compund word

Title says it all.

Example: un-freaking-believable.

Tmesis

Man, two minutes!

Thanks. Coincidental that I used the same example.

Infix

One of the class of affixes, the most copmmon of which are prefix and suffix.

BTW dystmesis is the same, but with the extra word inserted in an unlikely place (so to speak): “unbe-freakin-lievable”

I can’t be the only one who thinks unbe-freakin’-lievable is the right place for it to go. In fact, Wikipedia backs me up as to un-freakin’ believable being the less regular way. After all, expletive infixation does obey certain rules (see cite).

Right. You cannot insert a word into a metrical foot. “Unbelievable” breaks up as (un.be.)(lie.va.)(ble.)

Native speakers do that all the time, so yes, you can.

Okay, so what’s the term for things like “bass-ackwards”?

Come to think of it, are there any other things like “bass-ackwards”?

Spoonerisms, especially if unintentional.

Wow, exactly the same point with exactly the same example was given five years ago in this thread.

Oh, I’m not saying you should have found it. I just remembered it because steno is my brother, and as far as I know that was his only thread! :slight_smile:

Can anyone think of examples where the inserted word isn’t either a cuss word or a euphemism for a cuss word?

{Talking about infixing “bloody”}: “The word went through, for the first time in the history of a language of the Indo-European family, a grammatical and syntactical process that is known only to several American Indian languages and to on or two others. That is the process of infixing, in which a particle, or a part of a word, or a whole word, is placed in the middle of another word…”

Ashley Montague, The Anatomy Of Swearing

As far as I know, adjectival swearwords like “bloody” and “fucking” are the only ones that are English infixes.

In American english, “fucking” and variants of it are the only infixes.

I don’t know about that. I’ve heard people confused by where to break the word “another” say things like, “That’s a totally nother problem!”

Are they native speakers of English?

It is probably an error. “That’s a totally nother problem!” should be “That’s totally another problem!” or “That’s a totally different problem!” They seem to have collided.