English words containing inserted expletives, like absobloodylutely or unbefuckinglievable, are often said to be created by ‘infixation’. One goal of this work is to argue that such claims are self-contradictory. Infixes are affixes, but the expletives are not. Rather, they are themselves morphologically complex, are not bound, and can occur with words from different syntactic categories. Hence, the expletives are full words, and the only property they share with infixes is their phonologically determined insertion point. Due to these factors, I suggest that words like absobloodylutely are discontinuous compounds instead, in which the expletive forms a new word with the word it interrupts. I further argue that discontinuous compounding is even rarer than actual infixation cross-linguistically, which makes English a typological outlier. On the other hand, I try to show that the apparently idiosyncratic properties of expletive compounds are compatible with English compounding at a more abstract level. In addition, the article seeks to establish some tentative diachronic and cognitive mechanisms that may have led to the emergence and retention of expletive insertion. The overall conclusion is that, once morphological phenomena are analyzed in sufficient detail, novel structural patterns and parallels may emerge.

包含插入咒语的英语单词，如ABSOBLODYLUTELY或UNBEFuckINGLIEVABLE，通常被认为是由“infixation”创建的。这项工作的目标之一是论证这些主张是自相矛盾的。中缀是词缀，但脏话不是。相反，它们本身形态复杂，不受约束，并且可以与来自不同句法类别的单词一起出现。因此，咒骂词是完整的词，它们与中缀共享的唯一属性是它们的语音确定的插入点。由于这些因素，我建议像“绝对血腥地”这样的词是不连续的复合词，其中咒骂词与它中断的词形成一个新词。我进一步认为，不连续的复合比实际的跨语言固定更为罕见，这使得英语成为类型学上的异常值。另一方面，我试图证明咒骂复合词明显的特殊性质在更抽象的层面上与英语复合词兼容。此外，本文试图建立一些可能导致咒语插入的出现和保留的尝试性历时和认知机制。总体结论是，一旦形态现象得到足够详细的分析，新的结构模式和相似之处就可能出现。