Grammar

[jameshroberts]

The phrase "A whole nother ..." infuriates me. There is no such word as "nother". The phrase is either "Another whole ..." or "A whole other ...". I would also accept "An whole other ..." if you're being British or something. I'm ok with splitting infinitives, but not articles.

Comments

[jazzfish]

What have you got a-freaking-gainst infixes?

[jameshroberts]

Things like that actually bother me less, because (my perception is that) the user of such a "word" recognizes that it's an infix and not a true word. You even hyphenated your example. In the case of "nother", I see no such recognition that "other" snuck up on "an" in a dark alley, beat him to a bloody pulp and ran off with his only consonant.

Interestingly, the wikipedia article on English articles says that in the past the initial "n" on certain nouns has been poached by the preceding article. For example "A napron" became "An apron". Surprisingly for wikipedia, the article fails to shoehorn the word "portmanteau" in anywhere.