Tmesis

Greek term; the English word from 1550s

Rhetoric — cutting a word in half and putting something inside

The figure of speech in which a word or compound is split apart and another word inserted into the gap, as in abso-bloody-lutely. The Greek name means simply "a cutting". In Homeric Greek a verb and its prefix frequently stand apart where later Greek would join them, and Ennius produced the most notorious Latin example by splitting cerebrum in half around a verb. In modern English the device is almost always comic, and the inserted element is usually an oath, which linguists call an expletive infix.

How to spot them

▸A word chopped in two with a rude word dropped into the gap
▸The Greek name means 'a cutting', from the verb meaning to cut
▸Homer's verbs and their prefixes standing apart
▸Ned Flanders and his -diddly-

Key facts

Abso-bloody-lutely and fan-bloody-tastic

The standard English demonstration; the inserted oath is called an expletive infix

Ennius split the Latin word for a brain in half around the verb, to comic effect

Saxo cere- comminuit -brum: 'he smashed his brain with a rock'

In Homer a verb and its prefix regularly stand apart, where later Greek would write them as one word

The original context in which Greek grammarians described the figure

What place soever, and how much soever, splittings of two ordinary English words

Whatsoever and howsoever, cut in two — the standard literary examples

Ned Flanders greets his neighbours with a syllable inserted in the middle of the word

Wel-diddly-elcome, in The Simpsons

Speakers say 'a whole nother story', splitting a word between its first syllable and the rest

Another, cut after the indefinite article

John McCarthy showed in 1982 that the insertion goes immediately before the main stressed syllable (1982)

Which is why it is abso-bloody-lutely and not ab-bloody-solutely

Key ideas

English has almost no infixes in its ordinary grammar — affixes go on the front or the back — so this figure is the one place where English speakers reliably put material inside a word, and they do it with remarkable consistency.

Quick-fire facts

•The name is Greek, from temnein, 'to cut'
•The English word is recorded from the middle of the sixteenth century
•Classical rhetoricians treated it as a licence of poetry, allowing a compound to be separated for metre or emphasis
•The Ennius line, quoted by Cicero and by Servius, is the standard Latin textbook example
•Linguists describe the modern English version as expletive infixation
•John McCarthy's 1982 paper established the stress rule that governs where the insertion may go
•The inserted element is almost always a single trochaic word, which is why longer insertions sound wrong
•In Australian and New Zealand English, the inserted word is often 'bloody', giving forms like un-bloody-believable
•Old English and Middle English split whatsoever and howsoever freely, giving 'what place soever'
•Shakespeare and Milton both use separated compounds of the classical kind

Drill it — 7 cards

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Sources

M. H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham — A Glossary of Literary Terms
David Crystal — The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language