A Shit Ton of Infixing and Interposing Lands on Slough House, Everyone Survives

The intelligence officers of Slough House, good at everyday profanity, are proficient infixers and interposers, too. An infixing, remember, is when one inserts profanity into the structure of a word, at a stress appropriate point (unfuckingbelievable); an interposing inserts the profanity between words in a fixed or idiomatic phrase (go to hell < go the fuck to hell). Infixings and interposings occur infrequently in speech, but when it comes to any variety of profanity, the slow horses are well ahead of the common herd.

Jackson Lamb infixes and interposes with abandon. As he points out to River Cartwright, whose grandfather had been a powerful spook in his day, “But no, you’ve got a grandfather. Congratufuckinglations. You’ve still got a job” (SH 37). The infixing drips with disdain for both grandfather and grandson, well-earned in the grandfather’s case — if you don’t already know that and why, then you really need to read the books.

These micro-adventures in profanity aren’t always exciting, as proved in Lamb’s occasional “Ha-de-fucking-ha.” (BA 195). But sometimes they are especially apt, as when he confronts the person who is likely his only friend, the Service’s librarian Molly Doran: “You’re supposed to be an archivist, not Barbara bloody Cartland” (LDL 216), which means that she’s cut closer to the bone than Lamb would like. At his best, though, Lamb is a subtle interposer: “I think you should hurry the fuck up” (LDL 217), which is really a sort of verbal power play — the demand to accelerate is made with a linguistic structure that attenuates the message. Only someone in charge can play such sweary games.

Even the least sweary of the slow horses, Catherine Standish, interposes intelligently, with implications. Frustrated at work, she does not drink, though she’s a recovering alcoholic, “Nor did she browse the Blue Book — let alone Sylvia bloody Plath” (DL 75) — that is, she’s stressed but she’s certainly and ironically, not suicidal. Sometimes, Diana Taverner, even when First Desk, that is, head of the intelligence service, is a syllable short of Lamb: “Ha bloody ha” (SW 180). Her predecessor, Claude Whelan, at his most courageous, manages a fine, though dated, pop-cultural interposing: “Dropping the phone into his lap, he grabbed the wheel with one hand, reached for the brake with the other, and the car lurched, throwing him forward again, and then he was leaving the ground — Christ alive, he was in Chitty fucking Bang Bang” (BA 280).

When Sid Baker asks River Cartwright, “Will you pay afuckingttention?” (SH 155), she’s not infixingly “wrong,” exactly, but it’s unusual to place an insert after a solely vowel syllable — is Herron, as author, challenging linguistic conventions, what a linguist might call “acceptability constraints,” or is Sid less adept at infixing than her senior, more practiced colleagues? Whichever, it’s unusual to observe an author working out the parameters of infixing and interposing as a means of characterization. I’ve not done the necessary counting, but I doubt that many works of fiction experiment with varieties of infixing and interposing as much as Herron’s do. Out of the experiment comes comedy, readerly pleasure, and a demonstration of Herron’s verbal finesse.

Of all the characters besides Jackson Lamb, Shirley Dander is especially given to infixing and interposing. One never knows what will come out of Dander’s mouth, but, as her partner, Marcus Longridge observes (as do we all), “Shirley’s a loose fucking cannon” (RT 145). Some of her interposings are weak, their matrices not really fixed phrases or idioms: “What the hellfuck is going on?” (LR 67) is perfectly good, everyday swearing, and the fuck here does act as an “emotional stress amplifier” (James McMillan’s phrase in his classic article on infixing and interposing in English), but “What is going on?” is barely interposable. “Grow fucking up” (RT 156) isn’t much more exciting, and she, like Lamb and Taverner, occasionally succumbs to inanity with a “Ha-de-fucking-ha” (RT 229), the prelude to which, “First thing she’d do would be send Lamb a postcard. Wish you were here?” only proves her childishness.

But when she’s on, she’s fire: “She could either man the fuck up or head the hell home” (LR 76) and the splendid “It’ll be an omnifuckingshambles” (LR 109). Shirley is insecure and angry about it. In her mind, she puts her fellow slow horses in their interposed places: “Catherine bloody Standish. Not to mention Lech bloody Wicinski and Louisa bloody Guy” (BA 151). She leaves Lamb out of it, wisely if for no other reason than he can beat her at all linguistic games. Well, except that, when Shirley’s out of control, linguistically and otherwise, she bursts into flame: “‘Jesus screaming fuck!’ said Shirley” (BA 155), which is both a trick and perfect characterology. Jesus screaming Christ would work; so would the well-worn Jesus fucking Christ; but Jesus screaming fuck! is meant to sound like an interposing when it’s not. Like Shirley, it’s more than a little crazy.

Diana Taverner, boss of bosses in the British intelligence services, is a skilled interposer, though I notice that she doesn’t do infixings. Usually, when she resorts to an interposing, it’s in the interest of asserting her authority. When something she knows is above her interlocutor’s pay grade, she can dismiss them easily, “On account of mind your own fucking business” (DL 128). She summarizes a crisis as “Your boss is in a heap at the bottom of the stairs, this Candlestub bullshit will be history by bedtime, and I’m First fucking Desk. You have two seconds to decide where your loyalties lie, and by loyalties, I mean career prospects” (BA 260), and unsurprisingly, she gets her way. But more than effective, she’s also an elegant interposer: “How in the name of John le fucking Carré can Service product go walkabout?” (SH 148), she asks. She could have put it differently, as “How in the name of John fucking le Carré can Service product go walkabout?” neatly dividing fore- and surname, but she’s more stylish than that, and reassuringly competent, even if it is only a sort of linguistic competence.

As with all swearing, however, Jackson Lamb exceeds expectations. Superficially, his interposings and infixings look like anyone else’s: “Oh, goodie fucking gumdrops” (JC 40), he intrudes at one point. “Catherine said, ‘Happy now?’ ‘You know me. Like Pollyeffinganna on Christmas morning,’” Lamb responds. [LR 145). When Molly Doran announces, “‘I’ve a story to tell,’” Lamb’s frustration is infixed: ‘Oh, great. Jackabloodynory. Will it take long? Only I have plans’” (LDL 210). “Well, supercalifragilisticfuckmealadocious. And people say funerals are glum affairs” (JC 70). But these aren’t quite ordinary infixings or interposings, after all. In fact, they’re on the edge of acceptability, because topically, they swear about kid things: Jackanory, the BBC reading show for children; Mary Poppins; gum drops; Pollyanna and Christmas. It’s like a children’s bloody bookshelf, with snacks, and a little creepy. How far will Lamb go to offend? (Answer, given all the Slough House novels and stories, too far.)

Any connoisseur of infixing, however, will appreciate Lamb’s nuanced proficiency, as when he inserts a euphemism into Pollyanna, rather than –fucking– it. And Jackanory is the perfect base for an infixing critical of Molly’s storytelling, because besides referring to the television show, it derives from a schoolyard rhyme — rhyming slang, in fact — in which Jackanory equals story and story means ‘tall tale’ or even ‘lie.’ If you know the book, you know that Lamb knows what’s coming, that Jackabloodynory is the sort of deflection you’d expect of a spy. Or anyone. At first, one may not even register that, in supercalifragilisticfuckmealidocious, he clips –expi– from the matrix and replaces it with –fuck me-. It’s not a textbook infixing, in other words, but an on-the-fly invention of a master infixer.

Between semantics — the themes — and word structure, infixing and interposing in the Slough House novels express matters of superiority and power. When Shirley bloody Dander aggressively contrasts herself with her co-workers, she’s asserting power in thought that she can’t quite manifest in action. Diana Taverner, her career always at risk from in- and outfighting, interposes to emphasize her power, a sort of verbal foot-stamping. But Lamb gets away with a level of perversity beyond anything any of the others could imagine except as it comes from him, and therein lies considerable power, the power that doesn’t give a fuck. He tests the limits, and in doing so he establishes new limits — for himself. Further, though, he conjures infixings and interposings much as he conjures lit cigarettes from nowhere. That is, he continually performs the impossible without showing any effort, the very quality that Baldassare Castiglione named sprezzatura, the aesthetic power of a gentleman, of an artist, in this case an artist in colorful and technically daring profanity.

This is the second of three posts about slow horses and profanity — the others are here and here. Key to novels cited: BA= Bad Actors (2022); DL = Dead Lions (2018); JC = Joe Country (2019); LDL = Last Dead Letter (2020); LR = London Rules (2018); RT = Real Tigers (2016); and SH = Slow Horses (2016); and SW = Standing by the Wall

#CatherineStandish #ClaudeWhelan #DianaTaverner #JacksonLamb #MarcusLongridge #MickHerron #MollyDoran #RiverCartwright #ShirleyDander #SidBaker #SloughHouse