An expletive attributive is an adjective or adverb (or adjectival or adverbial phrase) that is meaningless and merely used to intensify. Typically the word or phrase is regarded as "bad language".
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As examples, in sentences such as
bloody (or "bloody well") contributes nothing to the meaning. Rather, it suggests the strength of feeling (usually anger or irritation, but often admiration, etc.) of the speaker. An expletive attributive is an intensifier.
The expletive "goddamn", a counterpart to bloody more commonly used in North America, can be used as a substitute in most (but not all) situations. On the examples above, only "I goddamn hope" would be infelicitous.
Other words that are never thought of as offensive can be used in similar ways. For example:
The phone line discussed may (before it was cut off) have been just as good as any other, and therefore would not have been wretched in the dictionary senses of "extremely shoddy", "devoid of hope" or similar. Rather, wretched serves here as a politer equivalent of expletive bloody and the like. However, such meaningless uses of inoffensive words are seldom referred to as "expletive".[1]
In English, an expletive attributive can be infixed (inserted within another word, for "un-bloody-believable", etc); see expletive infixation.
Expletive comes from the Latin verb explere, meaning "to fill", via expletivus, "filling out". It was introduced into English in the seventeenth century for various kinds of padding—the padding out of a book with peripheral material, the addition of syllables to a line of poetry for metrical purposes, and so forth. Use of expletive for such a meaning is now rare. Rather, expletive is a linguistics term for a meaningless word filling a syntactic vacancy (see syntactic expletive). Outside linguistics, the word is commonly used to refer to "bad language". Some linguists use it as shorthand for "expletive attributive".