A Whole Nuther Thing

What's up with that? I often hear people using the expression "a whole nuther." A local football coach was quoted in the paper using it. No dictionary I know includes nuther. I don't believe anyone who uses the expression would even argue that nuther is a word.

I did a little web research and found some interesting discussion of this odd construction. One these two theories seems to explain it:

1) The modifier whole is inserted in the word another. This is a linguistic phenomenon called infixation, which most commonly occurs in expletives. Mild examples would be "abso-bloomin-lutely," or "guaran-darn-tee."

2) The other theory is that people confuse another with a nother, and are simply applying the adjective whole to the second word. This sounds odd, but it's a linguistic occurrence called reanalysis. It's how we now have the word apron. It derived from the french word naperon. People misconstrued "a naperon" as "an aperon."

I find the first explanation easier to buy, but it was interesting to learn that it's a matter of some debate.

The question remains, of course, whether "a whole other thing" or "another whole thing" are adequate replacements for "a whole nuther thing."