If you ever happen to be talking to a self-appointed expert in grammar and usage (this clearly doesn’t include me, by the way), you might hear them talk about things like “gerunds” and “subjunctive tense;” stuff like that. If you feel like you’re getting out-jargoned, pull out a few of these handy terms; you’re sure to win the day.
A “morpheme” is the tiniest bit of language that carries meaning. You can have “free” morphemes, like a word (cat, dog, that, more, etc.) that can stand alone, or “bound” morphemes that only have meaning when they’re attached to another morpheme. The “s” used to make “cat” plural is a bound morpheme — so while “cat” is a morpheme, “cats” is a combination of two.
There’s a form of verbs called the “optative,” which means the verb is indicating the speaker’s wishes. English doesn’t have a specific form for verbs like this but we do have ways to construct optative phrases such as “may you live happily ever after.” Technically the optative is very similar to the subjunctive (I know, getting jargony here) but while the SUBjunctive creates a SUBordinate clause (this is how you can remember what it is), an optative verb or verb phrase stands alone.
Now, your grammarian probably knows about the “imperative,” which describes words that are commands or orders. But it’s a bit more subtle than that; an imperative expresses the speaker’s hopes about the future, and expresses the wish that the listener should be responsible for that future. An imperative is generally targeted at a specific listener, as when you say “wait.” You’re expressing your desire that the person listening to you waits, and they’re responsible for whether they do or not. But there’s also the “hortative.” A hortative is similar to an imperative, but the speaker is saying they want others involved as well. “Wait” is an imperative, and “let’s wait” is a hortative because now the speaker (and maybe others) are involved. The rule of thumb is that if you hear an imperative and the words “let us” are connected, what you have is probably a hortative.
An “affix” is a morpheme that can’t stand alone; it has to be connected to another morpheme. An affix might be a prefix or a suffix (notice that “fix” at the end of all three). And there are also “infixes,” although not so much in English, and “circumfixes,” which a combination of a prefix and a suffix used together. This one is also not really used in English, but you do find circumfixes in German. “Speilen” means “to play”, and you add “ge” to the beginning and “t” to the end to get “gespielt” (played).
Have you ever heard anyone say “aks” in place of “ask”? That’s a “metathesis” — swapping the order of sounds in a word. “Aks” goes all the way back to Old English, and for most of its history it’s been a perfectly acceptable alternative, sort of like today we accept both “nuclear” and “nucular.”
And finally, one that very few people know about is a “clitic”, which is similar to a prefix or suffix except that it has to do with a whole sentence instead of a single word. For instance, “the dog with the long tail’s bone” means “the bone belonging to the dog with the long tail”, and the possessive “s” in this context is a clitic because it’s modifying the whole noun phrase “the dog with the long tail”. Some people would argue that it’s better writing if you avoid using clitics with noun phrases like that (although when they argue they’re probably not going to know the word “clitic”), and noun phrases can get awkward — but for all that, there’s nothing really wrong with them. I mean, without noun phrases, English would have to be one of those languages where “dog with long tail” and “dog” are different words. In Finnish, I’m told, there can be more than 60 different words for “dog.” Probably one of them means “dog with long tail.”
