Effing prosody.

[owlectomy]

I used to know a lot about the prosody of what linguists refer to as expletive infix, but no matter where you put the infix, ridiculous sounds... ridiculous.

Absolutely is two trochees -- AB so LUTE ly -- so expletive infix (also a trochee) slides nicely right in there, but ridiculous is an iamb and two unstressed syllables -- ri DI cu lous.

I think expletive infix works better if you put it in after an unstressed syllable, so maybe the XKCD person's "awkward" way of saying it is the best one there is, but they're right about the awkwardness of that last syllable.

No word yet from Language Log, usually the foremost authority in webcomic linguistics.

Comments

[boxofdelights]

ri-fucking-diculous has a weird, newborn-giraffe sort of charm.

[heliopausa]

That's the formation which I would expect - i.e. it sounds most normal to me. So it ends up as two dactyls, the first one rather drawn out, making the stress on -dic- very strong and angry.

[owlectomy]

Yeah, on reflection I think that's the way that works best for me if there's a stressed syllable before the word -- THAT's ri-fucking-diculous, for example, sounds most natural to me.

Well...

[ysabetwordsmith]

The way I heard it, the expletive infix (in English) goes before a stressed syllable. However, that has kind of turned into a linguist in-joke with putting it after a stressed syllable instead.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Ri-bloody-DI-cu-lus?

Ab-so-blooming-LUT-ly?

Well, those work. Try cleaning up your infix.