Notherlover

A reader urges: "'A whole nother.' Discuss. Hopefully with irate passion."

You wouldn't be scandalized if I said it's virtually impossible to make "a whole nother" work in formal writing, right? What if I told you there was the tiniest, most fleeting chance it was actually legitimate?

"A whole nother," which has been around for more than a century, is caught halfway between two theories. One says it was created through a form of infixation, which is stuffing one word into another, often for emphasis ("un-fucking-believable!"). I think this emphasis helps explain why "a whole nother" has made a beach-head against "a whole other," which is grammatically unassailable but strikes me as effete without that "n."

In the other theory, AWN is a colloquial remnant of "a nother," which is how some people said "an other" and "another" in the time before dictionaries (this phenomenon is why "newt" begins with a consonant today and "apron" doesn't, to use two well-worn examples).

The earliest use I can find is, naturally, no help. To 1890, and "The Mysterious Guide" by Mrs. Molesworth: "'Will the fog be gone by to-morrow morning?' said Patty, disconsolately. 'I don't know what we shall do if we have to be a whole 'nother day in the house and in the dark.'"

Molesworth tries to class it up with an apostrophe, just as writers sometimes do today. For that reason, I'm tempted to say this is close enough to an infix. On the other hand, the apostrophe also means it's a freestanding word. And the "other" "nother," while somewhat out of currency in the late 19th century, was hardly unknown.

OK. There's academic exercise and there's arrant geekery, and the fact that I can't see the line in front of me only means I've crossed it. I didn't really want to guess at a theory, I just wanted to stick up for AWN. A pitiable little colloquialism, sure -- but it's survived more than a century in the face of a widely preferred substitute, and that's kinda cool.

But just for closure: Bill Safire called it an infix, and he didn't hide "nother" behind the fig leaf of an apostrophe. I don't know that he's right, but he'll get the last word.