Abso-jesus-lutely not: Why can you infix “fucking” and “bloody” but not other swears?

Here’s a puzzle: why can’t you say “abso-jesus-lutely”? (Recently brought to my attention by Leland Paul Kusmer.)

Let’s back up for a sec. The classic case of expletive infixation involves “fucking” or “bloody” as in abso-fucking-lutely, abso-bloody-lutely. And one syllable swears can’t infix: there’s no abso-fuck-lutely or abso-shit-lutely. But “Jesus” is two syllables, people swear with it, and it even has the same stress as the other two. Why doesn’t it sound right as an infix?

I took the question to twitter, and we came up with some great examples.

(Note that for most people, abso-fucking-lutely and abso-bloody-lutely are definitely the best, so if you’re a really conservative infixer you may only accept those two, but for most people “good” novel examples like abso-shitting-lutely are at least kinda okay, while “unacceptable” novel examples like abso-bastard-lutely are completely out.)

First off, it’s not that you can’t infix religious swears: abso-goddamn-lutely and even abso-christing-lutely are fine. And while there’s a 2-syllable minimum, there doesn’t appear to be a syllable max, as long as you can find a swear that’s long enough: abso-muthafucking-lutely is fine as well. In fact, you can even do an apparent double infixation, as in abso-mother-bloody-fucking-lutely. (Try saying that five times fast!)

But when we run through the list of two or more syllable swears, we get a suggestive contrast.

Pretty good:
Abso-shitting-lutely
Abso-arsing-lutely
Abso-goddam-lutely
Abso-christing-lutely
Abso-mothafucking-lutely

Flat-out terrible:
Abso-asshole-lutely
Abso-douchebag-lutely
Abso-shithead-lutely
Abso-bastard-lutely
Abso-jesus-lutely
Abso-sonofabitch-lutely

The glorious minimal pair “abso-arsing-lutely” but “*abso-asshole-lutely” illustrates several things: it’s not about needing to be polymorphemic, since they both have ass/arse plus another morpheme, nor about which swear is used as a base, since ass/arse are really the same swear (and *abso-arsehole-lutely is equally bad, I just don’t think North Americans have “assing” as a swear really in the first place).

What sets abso-arsing-lutely apart from *abso-asshole-lutely, and indeed all the good to relatively okay examples from the terrible ones, is that the bad ones are all nouns: you can say “what a bastard” or “what an asshole” but not “*what a goddam” or “*what an arsing.”

There is one apparent counterexample of a noun being infixed, from Leah on twitter, who reports that she had a prof who chickened out at using actual swears with students, and instead taught expletive infixation using the word “bunny” : abso-bunny-lutely, Pennsyl-bunny-vania, and so on.

Which is a) adorable, and b) the prof couldn’t have even used bloody or frikkin?? But I don’t think it’s a real counterexample — it seems to be okay only because “bunny” sounds very similar to the uncontroversial “bloody”: Elise McClay pointed out to me that abso-rabbit-lutely is utterly terrible.

(Twitter then turned into a conversation about whether you could infix emoji, with abso🍆lutely standing for approximately what you’d expect.)

There’s also a slightly weird case in abso-shitty-lutely. It doesn’t sound great to me, but I feel like it should be fine because it’s an adjective, like bloody, not a noun. But is “bloody” in, say, “bloody hell” really an adjective? You can exclaim “bloody hell” if you stub your toe, but “shitty hell” has to be descriptive, as in “I hope you end up in shitty hell” — for a stub-your-toe version, I’d have to exclaim “shitting hell” instead. So maybe the constraint goes in the other direction: infixes really have to be exclamatives, not nouns or adjectives or other parts of speech. It’s just that we don’t often think about exclamatives as a distinct category.

And this brings us to the closest minimal pair yet, the variant “jaysus.” As far as I know, “jaysus” is only used as an exclamative and never to refer to the person, so as an infix I think it sounds abso-jaysus-lutely fine.