dethbysquirl:

weresquirrel:

transiences:andywooo:animeasuka:wafflesforstephanie:yosb:

welcome to harvard: linguistics 101

Is this reality?

Abso-fucking-lutely.

yo the word fucking is actually really interesting because it’s one of american english’s only infixes

YES THIS IS ACTUALLY REALLY COOL MY AP ENGLISH TEACHER WENT ON A 5-MINUTE RANT ABOUT “FUCK” AND HOW IT’S THE ONLY WORD YOU CAN INSERT INTO OTHER WORDS 

I JUST HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS ABOUT THE WORD “FUCK” OKAY

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