Splitting a word in two and sandwiching an emphatic modifier between the two parts, as in abso-bloody-lutely or abso-doggone-lutely. Like the plural of all English words borrowed from Latin that end on -is, the plural of this word is tmeses.
Tmesis, Dr. Robert Beard writes, is the process of producing what linguists call a sandwich term: an expletive sandwiched between
No comments:
Post a Comment