Grammar girl here, this quotation from the grammar devotional explains our topic today.

Quote, from the email I receive, I'd say a whole nether bothers a whole lot of people.

Maybe if they knew how it compares to other words and phrases that are similar, they wouldn't hate it so much."

Some linguists consider a whole nether to be an instance of tamesis, using a word or phrase to separate another word or phrase into two parts.

Other linguists call it infixation, inserting an aphix in the middle of a word.

So what's the story with a whole nether?

To understand aphixes we have to understand morphemes. Fortunately they're interesting.

A morpheme is the smallest possible unit of meaningful sound or sounds.

For example, the sound you hear when you make an f sound is just a sound with no meaning.

And if I ask you whether the single sound S has any meaning, or if the three consecutive sounds in IST, Ist, have any meaning, you might say no.

But when you add S to the end of most nouns in English, it carries the function I am plural or I am more than one.

And if you add IST Ist to a certain limited list of word stems, like floor, florist, pianist, in lingua, linguist, it takes on the meaning someone who does or someone who has this profession.

These little morphemes or aphixes that change words are called bound morphemes, because they have to be attached or bound to something else to make sense.

Prefects are bound morphemes that attach to the beginning of a word, like incidentally pre and prefix.

And suffixes are bound morphemes that attach to the end, like the S example I just gave you.

But other languages have infixes that go in the middle, that are just as plain, regular, and unobtrusive as our plural S suffix in English.

For example, in Tagalog, there's an infix actually pronounced in, which is inserted into verbs to make them past tense.

So the word billy, bi-li, means to buy, and the word ba-in-i-li, b-in-i-li, means bought.

To wrap up our definition of aphics, you can think of it as an umbrella category that includes prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and other things we won't talk about.

So how does this fit into our whole nether puzzle?

The next step is to think about the most common way people use infixes in English.

To insert, oh my, curse words, especially the f word and its euphemisms.

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