As in, "Where's my nother slipper?" and "Mommy, where's the nother book?" She seems to have mixed up "another" and "other" and be using the hybrid "nother" for the latter of the two. This is a strategy that a lot of people, including adults, employ: when in doubt, make something up and deliver it convincingly!
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
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I think "nother" is pretty well attested, especially in the phrase "a whole nother" [Wiktionary], as in "She's taken it to a whole nother level."
The first time I heard the Texas slogan "It's a whole other country!" on a TV commercial, I thought to myself, that sounds weird, shouldn't it be "a whole nother country", and that's when I realized how strange the "a whole nother" construction was.
That was high school age, or thereabouts, but it wasn't until today that I learned the name for it: tmesis. What a peculiar word.
Oh, I see. The problem with the Texas slogan is that ... wait, isn't the slogan"it's like a whole other country"? Or isn't another country ... Although we might wish it was. But it is like another country ... or "a
whole nother" country.
Right you are. "It's like a whole other country!" it is.
Maëva's is a different use of "nother" not associated with the use of the indefinite article.
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