WORD OF THE DAY

tmesis
(n.) the separation of parts of a compound word by an intervening word or words, used mainly in informal speech for emphasis

You know when you get excited and you shove an f-bomb into the middle of "no way"? That's tmesis.

You can do it any-old-time, but when it comes to emphasis, nothing beats a curse. The Brits use tmesis every-bloody-where.

In English, tmesis also appears in between phrasal verbs--"a verb and a particle and/or a preposition that form a single semantic unit. For example, "turn off" has a specific meaning unrelated to "turn," but rather than saying "turn off the light," one could use tmesis to say "turn the light off."

But is the last example as fun as the first? Abso-freaking-lutely not.