Motti Eisenbach - Getting Up Close And Personal With Interjections

We had a sit down with an old friend of ours, Motti Eisenbach, to get his take on writing and essay composition.

Here's what he had to say.


     If one were to ask people walking randomly on the street what an “interjection” was, it can be assumed you would get mostly confounded responses. A small minority would likely have it stuck on the “tip of their tongues” and an even smaller minority might exclaim “Oh! I know this one!”


It has been said by every English teacher since the dawn of time that an interjection is simply a big word to describe a very simple idea. Interjections, in English, are the formal name given to the expression of exclaiming something in a given scenario. Interjections can be inquisitive, commanding, or even playful in nature.


In the literary sense, interjections are almost always written with an exclamation mark (!) at the end of their phrase. This is, of course, excepting the interrogative interjection which ends with a question mark (?) formally, or an interrobang (!? or ?!) informally. Interjections in English can appear at the beginning of a sentence, at the end of a sentence, or as their own clause, statement, or sentence fragment.


Examples of interjections in English would be as follows: Oh!, Wow!, and Amazing! Interrogative interjections would be things like: Really?, Oh?, and What!? A third class of interjections, called imperative interjections exist as well.


Imperative interjections are for issuing a command to someone who is, generally speaking, not in a position to refuse. This sort of language is also used in very heated scenarios, such as when arguing or fighting with a friend. Examples of imperative interjections (also called command interjections) are: Get out!, GO!, or Die!

When interjections are inserted into a sentence, such as in the example of the word “um”, they are said to have no grammatical connection to the sentence itself. To be clear, interjections when writing are quite rare outside of comic books and written fiction, or storytelling. They are certainly quite rare in any form of formal writing in English.


When compared to other grammatical constructions in the English language, interjections uniquely require a context to have meaning, and contain no meaning when standing on their own. An American slang interjection in the 1950s was “applesauce!” to say that what someone had said
previously was unbelievable, or to say that their statement stretched credulity.


Notice, if you would, that if one tried to bring this interjection back into fashion, it would be very difficult for anyone to understand its meaning without having it explained. In this way, interjections require a group effort to maintain their usefulness. If everyone in an area stopped using such unique interjections, they would lose their 'interjective' functions and would simply return to being words.

Notice proper use of an interjection in a recent newsworthy article by yahoo. 

Oh!

Don't forget to practice your interjections any time you get the chance. There are interjections for any situation; be it question or statement. One should never find themselves lost without an appropriate  interjection for any reason. Indeed the majority of our swear words began, and exist today, as interjections! Amazing!