Editor's Corner

Hello, all!

The last couple of days I inundated you with prefixes, suffixes, and affixes! And writing those articles made me wonder if the verb “affix” (to attach physically) is pronounced differently than the noun “affix” (a letter or letters attached to a word to make a new word) because in my head, I say them differently. Well, guess what! They are different! The verb is pronounced uh-fix; the noun is pronounced a-fix (“a” like apple). Of course, in my head I was saying a-fix (“a” like in aphid). Oops!

So today, I have two for the price of one. Remember, an affix (like apple) is a letter or sound added to a word to create a new word. Our affixes today are “infix” and “interfix.”

The original topic on Facebook that sparked this discussion is by Jess Zafarris; the definitions of infix and interfix are from Merriam-Webster.

Infix a derivational or inflectional affix appearing in the body of a word.

Note: English has few formal infixes; the plural marker "s" in cupsful is one. Informal infixes are often vulgar.

Woo-hoo! Vulgar! No, none of that here. Well, maybe a little of that here. “Bloody” and “freaking” are placeholders for something quite naughty in American English, but we need examples, so let’s just pretend that they are the mildest of mild.

Examples of infixes (the words added to the middle are the infix):

• fan-bloody-tastic
• abso-freaking-lutely
• abso-blooming-lutely
• un-freaking-believable

And these are pluralization infixes (an “s” is added to the middle of the word to make it plural):

• passersby (from passerby)
• cupsful (from cupful)
• spoonsful (from spoonful)
• brothers-in-law (from brother-in-law)

Our second type of affix is even more rare: the interfix. An interfix is:

A rare, empty linking element that connects two morphemes without adding meaning, often acting as filler between words to aid pronunciation in compounds. [KC – From AI: A morpheme is the smallest, indivisible unit of meaning or grammatical function in a language. For example, "dogs" contains two morphemes: "dog" (meaning a canine) and "-s" (indicating plural).]

There aren’t many examples, but here are a few:

• Adding “a”:
  • port-a-phone
  • port-a-potty
• Adding “i”:
  • agriculture (agri + culture)
  • carnivore (carni + vore)
• Adding “o”:
  • speedometer (speed + meter)
  • biography (bio + graphy)
  • technicolor (techni + color)

The Facebook reel described this type of formation as usually “necessary” in English to make words look or sound more similar to other words. For example, many words with “meter” are Greek and have a vowel after them, like barometer (baro meaning weight) or thermometer (thermos meaning heat). English speakers decided that adding an “o” to speedometer just made sense.

Kara Church | Technical Editor, Advisory | Knowledge Enablement

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