o1mnikent

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.