Any English speaker with an understanding of basic grammar is very comfortable with a prefix or suffix.
But what about the infix? We don't normally have this construct in English, except for the oddity of infixing an eff-bomb to intensify something in colloquial usage. The best example is "in-effing-credible".
With the news on Thursday that Federal District Court in South Dakota overturned that state's constitutional amendment banning marriage for same sex couples, my knee-jerk reaction to that arch-red state's case on marriage equality, even after all the events since Windsor, was "South Dakota? South Dakota!!" Then I realized, that response was not incredulous enough, and this needed an eff-bomb infix.
So: where does one put the eff bomb here?
My immediate reaction was, it had to be "South Da-fucking-kota" (apologies for the "French"). A co-worker felt it should be "South-Fucking-Dakota".And then, what about the euphemisms "effing" and "freaking"? "South Da-freaking-kota" feels wrong. Only "South Freaking Dakota" feels right.
What does a dirty mind do next? I asked my carpool mate, who is Canadian-Jamaican. He agreed with me, the it should be "South Da-fucking-kota" and "South Freaking Dakota."
I don't yet have an idea why the Anglo-Saxon belongs in a different part of Dakota than the euphemism. Any thoughts from my readers?
