Hopkins uses tmesis in stanza 34 of "The Wreck of the Deutschland":The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled        Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame,Mid-numberèd He in three of the thunder-throne!As editor Gardner explains it, "The second line contains a tmesis: 'Miracle-of-flame in Mary' is rearranged so that the position of 'in-Mary' suggests the furling of the child in the mother and also suggests that Mary herself is an intrinsic part of the miracle." What a lovely-rich image!

TMESIS: Intentionally breaking a word into two parts for emphasis. Goldwyn once wrote, "I have but two words to say to your request: Im Possible." In the movie True Lies, one character states, "I have two words to describe that idea. In Sane." Milton writes, "Which way soever man refer to it." The poet W. H. Auden makes emotionally laden use of tmesis in "Two Songs for Hedli Anderson," where he stretches out the word forever by writing: "I thought that love would last For Ever. I was wrong." In English, this rhetorical scheme is fairly rare, since only the compounds of "ever" readily lend themselves to it, but it is much more common in Greek and Latin. An exception to this generalization is the American poet e. e. cummings (the lack of capitalization in his name is a rhetorical affectation). Critics note that cummings makes particularly potent use of tmesis in poems like "she being Brand / -new", in which words like "brand-new" and "O. K" are artificially divided across separate lines of text to create an unusual, broken reading experience. Particularly clever poets may use a sort of infixation to insert other words of phrases between the two parts that have been split apart. For instance, a southerner might say, "I live in West--by God--Virginia, thank you very much!" Shakespeare, in Troilus and Cressida, writes the phrase, "how dearly ever parted" (III.iii), when we would expect to find the phrase written as "however dearly parted" in normal grammatical usage.

Coined 1586, from Late Latin tmēsis, from Ancient Greek τμῆσις (tmêsis, “a cutting”), from τέμνω (témnō, “I cut”).

The celebratory poem is by the popular Australian writer John Patrick O’Grady. (1907-1981) Apparently he originally titled it “The Integrated Adjective” — but for good reason the poem, (and by now, if not since long before the poem was written, the town itself) is famous as TUMBA BLOODY RUMBA. I will give you the entire text, in which you will notice that “bloody” (originally a religious oath — “by our Lady” — and for some reason much more repugnant to Brits than to Americans) is the expletive of choice,

Apparently, there was a poem written not too long ago by an Australian author and poet named John O’Grady[iii] entitled Tumba Bloody Rumba. I won’t include the poem here in its entirety, partly because its frequent use of the word bloody may offend some. Suffice it to say, the poem makes ample use of colourful tmesis with words such as “Tumba-bloody-rumba” and “kanga-bloody-roos.” The result, thanks in no small part to the almost hypnotic power of the word, is that tumbarumba has now become a synonym for tmesis in the English language.

"La-dee-freakin-da" became one of Chris Farley's signature phrases on Saturday Night Live. The Simpsons character Ned Flanders is known for his (mis)use of tmesis, inserting "diddly" into words such as "welcome" to come up with "wel-diddly-elcome."

Tmesis is mainly used to create humor, and lay emphasis on a particular word or phrase. The Romans and Greeks used tmesis for special effects in literature. In comedy, it works as over-done exaggeration. In poetry, its task is to stress a point, as it forces readers to give more attention to the cut phrase or line. It is regularly used in informal speech, as well. In Australian English, it is called “tumba rumba.” And now for the examples and additional explanation: Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw Eliza Dolitttle: “Fan-bloody-tastic” or “abso-blooming-lutely” Richard II, by William Shakespeare “How-heinous-ever it be,” Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare “This is not Romeo, he’s some other where.” In this excerpt, “somewhere” is split up by inserting the word “other.” The purpose of splitting up the word is to highlight and draw the focus of readers to the fact that Romeo is not there, but somewhere else. Hymn to Christ, by John Donne “In whattorn shipsoever I embark, That ship shall be my emblem Whatseasoever swallow me, that flood Shall be to me an emblem of thy blood.” This is a very good example of phrasal verb tmesis. “Whatsoever” is split into two parts by inserting the words, “torn ship.” The same is done in the third line, where the word “sea” is inserted in the middle of the compound word “whatsoever.” Troilus & Cressida, by William Shakespeare “That man–how dearly ever parted.” Shakespeare uses tmesis in his literary pieces. Here, the insertion of the word “dearly” into “however” emphasizes the fond feeling that the speaker has towards the dead person.

We’ll end this with a modern literary example of tmesis, from Kingsley Amis’s 1960 comic novel Take a Girl Like You: “It’s a sort of long cocktail—he got the formula off a barman in Marrakesh or some-bloody-where.”

“In what torn ship soever I embark, That ship shall be my emblem of Thy ark; What sea soever swallow me, that flood Shall be to me an emblem of Thy blood.”

Here are a few examples of these buttinskies in compound words: “abso-damn-lutely” …  “a whole nother” … “un-fucking-believable” … “any-bloody-body” … “god-freaking-awful.” The earliest example of tmesis in the Oxford English Dictionary is from a 1592 definition of the term that includes this example: “What might be soeuer vnto a man pleasing” (“What might be soever unto a man pleasing”).

Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, defines “tmesis” as a “separation of parts of a compound word by the intervention of one or more words (as what place soever for whatsoever place).”

Informal tmetic usage is ubiquitous but discouraged in formal writing. Examples include “a whole nother” and “any old how” as intensifications of another and anyhow. Recently, however, this form of tmesis has been supplanted in popularity by a form formally known as expletive infixation, in which a profane or otherwise emphatic word is inserted into an adjective to fortify its impact, as in abso-frickin’-lutely and la-dee-frickin’-da. Another colloquial construction is the emphatic insertion of so in such statements as “I am so not going there.”

A form of tmesis often heard spoken spontaneously but best reconstructed for writing is a possessive phrase such as “the girl in the back row’s,” referring to something belonging to a girl sitting in a back row; the modifying phrase “in the back row” is artificially inserted between girl and the possessive s. “The book is the girl in the back row’s,” for example, should be recast as “The book belongs to the girl in the back row.”

Phrasing in which the preposition down is located within the verb phrase “turn down” in “Turn down that music,” as opposed to its placement in “Turn that music down,” is a standard form of tmesis, as are whatsoever and unbeknownst, in which, respectively, so is inserted in whatever and be is placed within an archaic form of unknown.