I have just finished marking every last exam for all 206 of my lovely 101 students. It took days and days, but it’s done. The thrill of the achievement is just enough to distract me from realising that it took a good solid week out of my thesis time.
One of the questions I marked (over and over) was about infixation, where a morpheme is stuck inside a root. You’re likely to see this kind of thing in a language like Indonesian or some of the Polynesian languages. We don’t use it much in English, except for the occasional expletive infixation like abso-fuckin’-lutely.
But I was thinking about another possible example: a whole ‘nother, which, despite the word boundaries, seems a bit infixish to me.
The Texas state board of tourism missed an opportunity years ago to elevate the saying to official status. They came out with a tourism slogan: “It’s like another whole country.” I just know someone wanted to make it ‘a whole ‘nother’, but someone on the grammar squad nixed it. They screw everything up.
28 June 2006 at 2:46 pm
congratulations! do you know whats worse than marking 206 exams? actually nothing really….(north americas version of ‘the office’ comes a close second)
hope your well deserved holidays are thesis inspiring!
29 June 2006 at 12:41 am
I’m jealous. I’m still marking scripts and have loads still to come in in July 🙁 Currently I’m having the ‘were they in the same classroom as me’ experience…