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"interjection"
Definition: The part of speech that usually expresses emotion and is capable of standing alone.
Etymology:
From the Latin, "thrown in"
Examples and Observations:
- "When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb's bleat."
(Henry David Thoreau)
- "Well!"
(Jack Benny)
- "Psst! h'm! ah! oh! hem! ah! ha! hey! well! oh! pooh! poof! ow! oo! ouch! hey! eh! h'm! pffft!
"Well! hey! pooh! oh! h'm! right!"
(Raymond Queneau, "Interjections," Exercises in Style, translated by Barbara Wright, New Directions: 1981)
- "Yabba dabba do!"
(Fred Flintstone in The Flinstones)
- "It hit me like a ton of bricks, and I had to almost hide my face, because tears were welling up in my eyes. Just the thought of playing with Bird, wow!"
(Herbie Hancock)
- "I¹m much bigger in Britain than I am there. I'm well-known, but my name's 'That Guy' in America. . . . People shout: 'Hey! I know you! You're That Guy.'"
(Billy Connolly)
- "Hoo-ah!"
(Al Pacino as Colonel Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman)
- "M'm! M'm! Good!"
(Campbell's Soup advertising sloagn)
- "Aye, yii, yii, yiiii,
I am the Frito Bandito."
(1970s television commercial for Frito's Corn Chips)
- "Cowabunga"
(Chief Thunderbird in The Howdy Doody Show and Bart Simpson in The Simpsons)
- "Bam!"
Chef Emeril Lagasse)
- "Woo-hoo," "Yoink!" and "D'oh"
(Homer Simpson in The Simpsons)
Pronunciation: in-tur-JEK-shun
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