o1mnikent

In the new issue of The Atlantic, a fascinating piece on the hardest job in football:

…spend a weekend with a network production crew, and you’ll discover what it really takes to turn the on-field action into televised entertainment—intense preparation, frantic effort, brilliant improvisation, and an artistic genius named “Fish.”

[...] By the time Fish moved from news to sports in the mid‑’70s, the union was complete. Since then, broadcast dollars have helped turn players into multimillionaires and owners into billionaires. The medium has infiltrated the game itself, from TV time-outs, when players mingle aimlessly on the field waiting for commercials to end, to coaches’ challenges that rely on footage from network cameras to revisit questionable referee decisions. On the sidelines, coaches and players scrutinize shots from overhead cameras to study tactics and plot countermoves. Viewers watching at home see virtual bands drawn across the field denoting the lines of scrimmage and the first-down marker, and they can refer anytime to a floating graphic in an upper corner of the screen that displays the score, time remaining, and down and distance.

I’m a big fan of Google books, for lots of reasons. Here’s one of them.

From the NY Times:

Ben Zimmer, executive producer of a Web site and software package called the Visual Thesaurus, was seeking the earliest use of the phrase “you’re not the boss of me.” Using a newspaper database, he had found a reference from 1953.

But while using Google’s book search recently, he found the phrase in a short story contained in “The Church,” a periodical published in 1883 and scanned from the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

You know what other phrase works well? A whole nother.

Some readers will recall that I spent most of 2005 and 2006 enamored with this phrase. Until recently, I thought this phrase originated as a regionalism during the mid-twentieth century, and exploded into the mainstream with a Marlboro ad campaign for “a whole nother smoke” (a cigarette/cigar crossbreed, if you’re interested).

I was wrong. (Astonishing, I know.)

A few weeks ago, I found two published instances of whole nother from before 1900: Eighteen Stories for Girls, edited by R.N. Carey and published by Oxford (that’s nowhere near the American South), and The Story of A Spring Morning, and Other Tales, by Mary Ellen Edwards, and published in 1890! A snippet from the latter:

“Will the fog be gone by tomorrow 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.”

What does this mean? A whole nother is much older than I previously thought. If it appeared in a publication as early as 1894, then speakers must have been using it for decades before that.