Quote:
Originally Posted by carld
I used that phrase when writing to a friend and she wrote back it was an example of a legitimate English construct whereby one word is inserted into another to modify the meaning. Sadly, I don't remember what she called it, but it wasn't torturing the language as such.
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It's called infixation or tmesis and is not uncommon - quite often it's a swear word that is inserted to emphasise the base word - "
absofu**inglutely" - expressing strong agreement or assent for example. So
"a whole nother story", could be an example of that. Alternatively it could be
"a whole other story" gone wrong.