One day, in high school I believe, I caught myself saying “a whole nother”. Where did I get this craziness? Well, clearly by splitting ‘another’ into two words. I realized that “a whole other” or “an entirely other” or “a completely different” or “another thing entirely” were adequate substitutes that avoid grammatical suicide, and began to reform my speech.
Soon I noticed that this was not my own concoction, but something said quite commonly. It began grating on me and soon became a pet peeve.
Obviously, most people are going to catch this one before they go to write it; it’s more of a verbal anomaly. But consulting Google, I find 35.7k uses of “a whole nother” versus 154k uses of “a whole other”; the admittedly awkward “an entirely other” gets 2.55k votes, “a completely different” is used 643k times, and there are 14.4k uses of the elegant “another thing entirely”.
There isn’t too much more to say on this one, but please, for the love of all that is good, stop yourself from saying this!
It’s rather fascinating to see how the web (or at least Google’s index) has grown since this post. Three years later, there are 455k hits for “a whole nother”, 2.01m hits for “a whole other”, 23.8k hits for “an entirely other”, 1.95m hits for “a completely different”, and 154k hits for “another thing entirely”. Sadly, “a whole nother” seems to be growing faster than its peers. Or maybe more people are talking about its inappropriateness.