Did you know that "nother" is now officially defined as a word [adjective] by Merriam-Webster dictionary?

No.

Just no.

Another nail in the coffin.

Well, things like this do happen in the course of language development. The word “apron” was originally “napron”, but the phrase “a napron” got reinterpreted as “an apron”, thus the modern word.

Problem with “nother”, though, is that it really doesn’t exist outside of the stock phrase “a whole nother”, which is really just splitting the word “another” for effect, not creating a new word (similar to when people say things like “abso-fucking-lutely”.

I did not know that!

… I have access to oed.com where I am right now, which has historical definitions too, so I’m looking it up this [ ]other way for fun… at least according to oed, the “word” (if we’re calling it that?) has apparently been around since the 13th century, mostly as slang, although it had a different meaning… Earlier it was more likely to mean “no other”; and then through the 16th century it was often paired with other negatives (e.g. “neither nother” meaning “neither one nor the other”); but 16th century is also where the first dates of ” ‘nother” (with an apostrophe replacing the “a” in “another”) begins to appear, so perhaps that marks the gradual transition to a whole nother meaning? Now it appears primarily in that phrase, “a whole nother.”

Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive. In other words, they track actual usage, not correct usage. There’s no point in having a dictionary that doesn’t include the words people actually use.

Rates right up there with variables of :
The baby’s mother and father.
And the usages for acting disrespectfully.
The useage of ‘me and…...’ Is soooo very ~#%*€#?+*¥~!

No issue with it, i’m not a word snob.

Tempting. Soooo tempting.

Some of these words will not fit well into the world of work, for the world.
Many have no idea how or what to filter ‘9–5’, which grinds their progress to advance to a screeching halt. That factor has worked it’s way up the ladder of the top ten list on why hiring candidates are rejected by businesses.

Nother reason for one to not consider Merriam-Webster as authoritative.

Merriam-Webster has been failing for over 50 years. From The Gambit by Rex Stout (1962), featuring Nero Wolfe:

Mr. Wolfe is in the middle of a fit. It’s complicated. There’s a fireplace in the front room, but it’s never lit because he hates open fires. He says they stultify mental processes. But it’s lit now because he’s using it. He’s seated in front of it, on a chair too small for him, tearing sheets out of a book and burning them. The book is the new edition, the third edition, of Webster’s New International Dictionary, Unabridged, published by the G. & C. Merriam Company of Springfield, Massachusetts. He considers it subversive because it threatens the integrity of the English language….

@zenvelo Authoritative regarding what? Failing at what? Dictionaries track English as it is spoken. They don’t make judgments about what counts as a “real” word or “correct” English. It’s the people teaching us about what reference tools are and how to use them that seem to be failing here (since they don’t seem to be explaining what a dictionary is—and what it is not).

@SavoirFaire So what do you use a dictionary for? By your statement, anything I decide that can communicate what I mean is sufficient, and a dictionary is not worth the pixels it is displayed upon.

I’m amused that I hear “nother” used all the time on NPR.
I was self-conscious about using it, myself, until then.

I have questioned a number of people about using “nother” in the past, and I have yet to find anyone who was
A) aware they were using it or
2) cared.

You mean it’s a whole nother word!

My fluther handle just transitioned to a 4-word phrase!

@zenvelo I use a dictionary when I hear or read a word that I don’t understand. The dictionary will then tell me what it is used to mean. It will also tell me whether that usage is generally considered formal or informal and what the preferred spelling is, but it doesn’t tell me which words are “real” or “correct” and which are not. That’s not the job of a dictionary.

As to the other issue, we cannot unilaterally decide what is communicative. Communication is a two-way operation. It requires those attempting to convey and those attempting to understand. Words are conventions, and a dictionary tracks conventions that have been taken up in a way that is considered significant.

Webster’s third edition was very controversial. It was even call Bolshevik. Only because it described the language as it was used.