Shouldn't it be “A Whole Nother”?

The Whole 'Nuther — Vol. 2021, No. 2

Actually, no. I’ve chosen the name for this newsletter because it’s a good example of how language and politics get tangled up. Here’s what I mean:

Most people grow up using cultural and regional expressions in everyday conversation without thinking twice. In my case, they were often folksy phrases like a whole ’nuther, abso-damn-lutely, West-by-God-Virginia, and so forth. In the case of a whole ’nuther, one could more properly say another, but where’s the joy in that? Whole intensifies the expression, and adding it in the middle of another is just amusing, fun to say or hear, and the kind of instinctive, playful, everyday speech that makes listening to any good homegrown talker a delight.

Experts in rhetoric during the Renaissance started calling this usage tmesis (pronounced “tə’misᵻs”), which comes from Greek and means “a cutting”—another is cut apart (becoming a-nother) and whole is added in the middle.¹ Linguistics teachers today call this infixation—instead of a prefix (something added to the front of a word) or a suffix (something added to the end of a word), an infix is added to the middle.²

Do most people today care about those terms (or about footnotes)? Hell, no. I’ll even bet that you yourself were probably about ready to quit reading when I ventured into the weeds of rhetoric and linguistics there.

Unfortunately, the same person who’d happily say a whole ’nuther when telling a funny story aloud would never put it down on paper that way if you asked for a written copy, for fear of looking foolish to the sort of people who use words like tmesis and infixation. Academic experts tend to be viewed suspiciously and resentfully these days, which is where the politics comes in.

Ever since the Normans invaded England in 1066, killing off most of the educated English and placing French culture and language atop the social hierarchy, there’s been a tension between everyday English (four-letter words, anyone?) and the sophisticated, Latin-influenced grammar and vocabulary of aristocracy and culture. Novelists and playwrights have delighted in this over the years: George Bernard Shaw’s slum-born character Eliza Doolittle dreams of a better life, and in the musical My Fair Lady³ she sings, “Aow so loverly sittin’ abso-bloomin’-lutely still” (note the infixation!), hoping that Professor Henry Higgins can teach her to speak “all genteel-like,” since more upper-class speech patterns will open doors so she can make that life for herself.

But this gets complicated in America, where our national identity stems from rejecting unearned authority and aristocratic traditions, just as we rejected the British Empire that perpetuated them. While Americans have long sought to better themselves, and have traditionally seen education as a way of doing that, we’ve also celebrated the hardscrabble origins of our forbears. We disapprove of poor kids who become educated only to scorn the culture they grew up in. You could even argue this attitude caused the American Civil War: When the South seceded, as a way of holding on to a hierarchical planter economy based on slave labor and led by rich landowners who fancied themselves aristocrats, the more middle- and working-class North saw this as a threat, and fought to enforce a union (in Lincoln’s words) “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”⁴

More recently, out-of power Republicans, whose party began during Lincoln’s time by championing individual industry and equal opportunity, sought to regroup in the 1960s by weaponizing our native suspicion of elite, educated culture. First they appealed to aggrieved White Southerners angry about racial integration, then, in the 1980s, to aggrieved blue-collar workers in the North and Midwest who sensed that they were being left behind as low-tech manufacturing started moving overseas while “knowledge” and “service” economies prospered.

(Here in North Carolina, which had taken pride in its good roads, good universities, and progressive reforms since the New Deal, cynical reactionaries like Sen. Jesse Helms turned “liberal” into a dirty word during the 1970s and 1980s. They enlisted economic uncertainty and White grievance in a campaign to cut spending on social and educational programs, a campaign that hurt nearly everyone. And they started calling the Democratic Party the “Democrat Party,” implying that it wasn’t of the people at all.)

All this reached its logical conclusion in the 21st century during Donald Trump’s presidency, but it had been building for a while. Back in the mid-2000s, when I was teaching first-year writing at George Washington University, I found my students full of indignation at “elites”—and this at an elite school, one of the most expensive in America.

“But how about Navy SEALs?” I would ask them. “SEALs are America’s ‘elite’ warriors. So they’re part of the problem too?”

“No, no!” they’d shout. “That’s not it at all!”

Actually, that was exactly it. They didn’t object to people being elite per se, if they had really earned it, just to pointy-headed knowledge workers who thought themselves smarter than ordinary folks. Expert warriors were admirable. Out-of-touch academic experts and liberal writers were not.

When I admit to strangers that I’m a writer or an editor (or, worse, that I have a doctorate and sometimes teach English), they often get very self-conscious. I find this true even of highly educated technical people like physicians, dentists, and engineers, not just Uber drivers, store clerks, and mechanics. Typically, they’ll say something about how they were never any good at English, and how I wouldn’t want to see their terrible writing with all its errors. Thank God for spell-check, they say.

I used to take this as polite self-deprecation, but now I’m not so sure. What if it actually hides a kind of hostility?

Hostility—hostility to expertise, hostility to science, hostility to logic, hostility to questioning, hostility to appeals to civic virtue, hostility to honest debate, hostility to anything or anyone critical of entrenched self-interest, and hostility to the “other”—is the true hallmark of Trumpism. So far, hostility and grievance seem to have survived Trump’s presidency as the unifying essence of the Republican Party.

But it’s one thing to approach expertise skeptically, and to make experts clarify their ideas and justify their claims. It’s something else entirely to just write off anything you don’t want to believe as biased, elitist nonsense and fake news.

That, it seems to me, is what’s so insidious about the provocations of the American Right that we see every night on Fox News and from other so-called “conservative” media. (They’re not conservative at all, actually: they seek radical change. They favor upending the American political system and many of its egalitarian, democratic traditions so that only money and power matter.) They seek to weaponize Americans’ native impatience with elites and authorities, which was half of the story of the United States’ founding, and set it against the other half—the founders’ idealistic Enlightenment faith in ordinary people, in freedom of thought and religion, and in openly and honesty debating what you don’t agree on. To be part of the Republican base these days is to be essentially hostile to those of us who care about challenging ideas, about verifiable facts, about good-faith debate, and who believe in something other than “our kind of people” and our own financial interests.

Even though I love the creative misuse of English, and delight in the varieties of the language, I actually don’t look down on people who utter malapropisms⁵, misspell words, write unpolished sentences, or who haven’t studied Shakespeare, Einstein, and Freud. I’m ready to teach the skills of using better English because it’s a tool, not a mark of worth, and I’d like to get them interested in the ideas and facts that fascinate me because I think that helps make for kinder, more thoughtful people. But it’s fine if their lives have different priorities than mine does.

What’s not fine is when when corrupt autocrats convince them to resent me and my ideas, actively demonize me for expressing progressive views, and close their minds to anything I might have to say. That’s a whole ’nuther thing.

1. So why spell it ’nuther instead of nother? Admittedly, nother, as in “a whole nother,” is actually in the dictionary, whereas ’nuther isn’t. Here’s my thinking: when we see the word spelled nother, we want to pronounce it with a short O, like nozzle ('näzəl) or not ('nät), or a long O, like note ('nōt), instead of with a schwa grunt ('nəthə[r]), as it should be. I like to spell it more like the way it’s pronounced, with the apostrophe indicating a truncated word. 

2. Some usages like this have actually become “proper” English over the years. For example, whatsoever usually means the same thing as whatever, and no one objects to the intensifying “so.” It’s all part of how the language changes and evolves.

3. There’s a pun there, if you’re paying attention. Professor Higgins lives in Mayfair, a well-to-do West End neighborhood in London, while Eliza comes from Lisson Grove, not far away, but a formerly rural area that had become a slum during Victorian times. Someone from there like Eliza would pronounce “Mayfair” as “My fair.”

4. One irony about this is that the controversy over whether “Black English” (African American Vernacular English) should be respected and studied as a legitimate dialect (or “sociolect”), or just shunned as “bad” English, is actually part of the same question. The idea of doing so may be scorned by conservatives, but it’s of a piece with the same principle they’re fighting for on behalf of “traditionalism”: should we be made to feel that the culture we come from is inherently inferior to the one that our schools and universities are asking us to enter, a culture that looks down on our roots and traditions, that seeks to erase traces of them in us?

5. I actually collected a treasury of those in a book, Going to Hell in a Hen Basket: An Illustrated Dictionary of Modern Malapropisms, which you can still buy.