So for most of March I was given a rest from my day to day duties as a teacher. University students studying English were placed in my class, and for 4 weeks tried there hand at teaching. I will admit it was boring sitting in the back of class, taking notes and offering advice. Not to say they did a bad job. My mind, however, can only concentrate on the English Language for so many minutes at a time. I became very productive in writing postcards during class, but that is besides the point. I want to take you back to one particular class where I was paying attention.
As an experienced English professor there isn't much I don't know about my mother tongue(wink). However, on this particular day my practicum student introduced me to a term that I had never come across. Part of the class was on affixes; prefixes such as re- and suffixes such as -ology. After introducing these two terms to my students the student trainee went on to a third term. Infixes. I shifted my weight in my chair and leaned a little closer to listen to what she was going to say, after all this was new to me and I was slightly interested. As I guessed, infixes are words that include another word inside of the them. The trainee wrote one word on the board to demonstrate all three terms.
Unbelievable
In this word un- represents the prefixe and -able represents the suffixe. I thought to myself "well where is the infixe?" She wasn't finished. To demonstrate to the class an infixe she added a word to the middle of unbelievable. With her back to the class she busily wrote this word on the board. When she turned around there it was basically shouting at us on the board!
Un(bad word that starts with F)believable
I was taken a back at first. Was this actually happening? After the shock came laughter as she casually pronounced the word to the class and explained how it could be used (I'm afraid they are going to start using it when I hand them back their midterms). She had lost my concentration. and would have lost any students concentration in Canada, but the students wrote it down like they were learning a new vocabulary word and then continued on with the lesson.
At the end of the lesson I approached her and told her she probably shouldn't use that example in class in the future. I then asked her where she found the term infixe and the example she so eloquently used. I will admit I was thinking it had to be Urban Dictionary, but she said it was in her textbook. "Hmmm can you bring it tomorrow?". "I won't be here tomorrow, but I can bring it next Monday."
Sure enough, Applied English Linguistics, page I forget, but it was there.
