Another grammatical shenanigan that always bothered me, but that I never cared to actually look up.
Consider this dialogue:
A: I don't want to go because it'll be too crowded.
B: But that's a whole 'nother thing! You told me you didn't want to go because you're socially awkward!
Note how anyone with grammatical OCD would cringe upon hearing the bolded section. I happened to look up tmesis on Wikipedia, and I glanced at the examples they gave. One of them, of course, was "congratu-f#$%-lations", akin to my example "abso-bloody-lutely," but their second one was the phrase bolded in the above dialogue. I took the liberty of naming this phenomenon casual or unaccustomed tmesis, a term which I'm sure will be quoted for generations to come. So in this case, you have "another" interpolated with "whole" to create "a-whole-nother." So next time you wish to express this idea, I would suggest "a wholly different idea," because I can't seem to figure out a way using "whole" and "another" that sounds right. Ideas?
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3 comments:
The example of "a whole nother thing" strikes me less as an instance of tmesis, than of metanalysis. That is, I would suggest that it isn't that "whole" is being inserted into the word "another", but that the word "another" is itself being reanalyzed as "a nother", within which "whole" can be inserted just as easily as in "a cake" => "a whole cake".
Metanalysis is the origin of our words "orange" (from "norange": "a norange" => "an orange"), "apron" (from "napron"), newt ("an ewt" => "a newt"), and several more.
How can we decide if "a whole nother" is tmesis or metanalysis? It would be easy if we found the word "whole" jumping into the middle of other words: "I ate the quesa-whole-dilla!" That would indicate that this is indeed tmesis. It would also be easy if we could find examples of "a --- nother" with a word besides "whole" filling in the blank. For instance, how does "an entirely nother thing" sound? If it sounds vaguely convincing to you, as it does to me, then you might agree that we're dealing with a case of reanalysis instead of tmesis.
Funny you mention that, the example of a-whole-nother was actually in Wikipedia as tmesis, but in explaining the example, it said "whole" and "another" are reanalyzed as "a-whole-nother." Are tmesis and reanalysis mutually exclusive, or does reanalysis lead to tmesis?
That's really interesting about the orange, apron, and newt; I actually was wondering where Spanish got the initial N in "naranja."
Truthfully, "an entirely nother thing" doesn't sound familiar because I think people recognize that it's too awkward to say and therefore replace "nother" with "different."
But good point. You're probably right. װי געװײנטליך...
This isn't exactly related, but-- do you know why we say "How come?" in American English. I found some discussion online that speculated that maybe it is derived from "How comes it?", but I didn't find any definite info. Do you have any ideas or any sources with information?
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