To live in a house with a teenager is to constantly improve expand oneâs vocabulary.
Far from being serenaded by any mellifluous panegyric or ululation, our senses are assaulted with rhythmic monosyllabic daggers like âbruh,â âsus,â or âmidâ that stab holes in our hopes for articulate and well-spoken offspring.
But isnât every generation granted its own unique set of words? Somewhere among each successive group, there must be some older non-peer who works undercover and deals in illicit phrases and nonsense words, giving middle schools starter kits of new slang.
Back in the â80s and â90s, we had our own versions with words and phrases that were equally as annoying to our parents, such as âhomey,â âwassup,â âgnarly,â and âfly.â
So when I recently allowed myself the verbal equivalent of a cheat code by saying âa whole notherâ instead of âa whole otherâ or simply âanother,â I thought I was reverting to my childhood.
You know, like slipping into old sweater, even though that shade of green might be out of style and the cuffs are tattered. Okay, maybe thereâs a hole or two from a moth. But Iâm just wearing it around the house â whoâs going to see it, anyway?
The withering look from my wife is all I need to remind me that I was going to throw it away last season. But the warmth and comfort of nostalgia tug heavily at me.
But thatâs a whole nother thing.
Ah â thatâs where we were. I thought the phrase was something from my childhood. I couldnât have been more wrong.
Upon researching âa whole nother,â I found that nother itself goes back to the 14th century, with whole being appended to it in the 19th century. So not modern slang at all.
Mustâve been those Victorian teenagers.
Even better, I discovered this etymological development has a name: rebracketing or resegmentation.
Rebracketing is where a word originally derived from one set of morphemes is broken down or bracketed into a different set.
And weâre surrounded by them.
Hereâs a quick example:
You undoubtedly know what a helicopter is. The two parts of the word are not heli and copter, but helico meaning âspiral,â (as in helix) and pter meaning âwingedâ (like a pterodactyl).
We then took the parts and appended them to other words, getting things like helipad and police copter.
Here are some other common words youâll recognize in this category as well.
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