Whole Nother

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, good morning, Martha and Grant.

This is James calling you from Hailua, Kona, and Hawaii.

Aloha and good morning.

Aloha.

How are you doing there?

Pretty good.

Sun’s just coming up.

Still nice and cool.

Nice.

Sounds wonderful.

So, I’m a recent listener to your show, and one just popped into my head.

Like, it’s one of those phrases that I think it’s okay to say, but I was actually writing it one day.

And my question is about the phrase a whole nother.

Oh, yeah.

I have a pretty good idea of what’s going wrong here, but I usually say it and it feels okay.

But I wrote it one day and I was looking at it and I was like, that’s nonsense.

You can’t say that.

What do you guys think?

So a whole nother as opposed to a whole other.

What were you writing?

Yeah.

Well, I actually wrote out a whole nother, and then I was looking at it and I was like, nother, there’s no way that’s correct.

There’s no way that’s okay.

Were you writing a term paper or a letter of complaint to a company?

No, it was probably just something on Facebook or something like that.

Oh, on Facebook. Okay.

Facebook, the big text hole of the era.

Of course.

Yeah, so here we go. This is interesting.

Let’s talk about what’s happening there from a linguistic point of view.

And then let’s talk about how it’s received and how we should behave around it.

A whole nother is basically what’s called a meta-analysis.

Where people hear the word another, and it kind of sounds like the word A, the article A, and then followed by a space, and then followed by the word nether, as if N-O-T-H-E-R were a word.

Now, nether has been a word, but it’s very rare.

It’s very archaic, obsolete.

Nobody uses it except in this expression.

Or I have a footnote, and an expression is like it.

And so this meta-analysis kind of is joking.

Maybe it was intentional.

Maybe it was accidental.

But it’s very catching.

Anytime you get this split, sometimes it sticks around and we keep using it.

And the pat-set phrase becomes idiomatic, a whole nother.

I have a whole nother reason for going out with her because she’s awesome, right?

I had no idea that another at one point, even though it’s archaic, was actually a word.

I thought I was just corrupting a whole other and another.

Yeah, this is a separate derivation.

And etymologically, this nother here isn’t connected to the other nother.

Oh, okay.

But here’s the interesting thing.

We do say a complete nother.

And we do say a full nother.

And we do say an entire nother.

And so what we’re starting to see here is that there’s kind of a place in between a and nother where we can put a word that approximately means the same thing as whole.

And so what we’ve come up here with a little bit of exploration on this whole concept of this word that was divided.

And almost always when people say a whole nother, it’s a non-serious situation.

You wouldn’t say it to a judge or the queen or the pope or the president or police officer.

It’s pretty informal.

And yet there’s a little bit of hilarity that goes with it.

It’s often associated with comedy or sarcasm or irony, that sort of thing.

But I think sometimes you just say it because you don’t even think about it.

Right, right.

It’s become idiomatic.

Yeah.

Yeah, and it’s accepted as idiomatic.

And there’s nothing really fundamentally wrong with it because it’s an idiom.

And idioms kind of exist on their own and should not be broken up into the component parts, as I almost always say.

And this kind of meta-analysis we’ve done for some other things.

The famous examples are apron and adder and newt, where we had the article before a noun, and then we misheard it and divided it the wrong way.

So, for example, apron, kind of the garment you wear in the tool shop or in the kitchen when you’re making something that’s messy, it used to be napron with an N at the beginning.

But people heard an apron instead of a napron.

This happens in English all the time where something that’s transmitted from mouth to ear is misunderstood and reinterpreted in an incorrect way.

So saying one word to write it, you separate it into three different words, a, whole, another, and just N-O-T-H-E-R?

Yeah, I mean, you’re fine with that.

But really, if you catch it in your writing, you could change it.

Just put a whole other or…

Yeah, I think that’s what I would do.

I think I would stop myself like you did.

I’m not in a situation to write formally, basically, ever.

Oh, well, that’s good.

All right.

Well, that’s rather eye-opening.

Thank you.

Thanks, James.

Mahalo.

Have a good day, guys.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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