Define "nother"

Dear Readers,
  I'm going to piggy-back on last month's posting that had to do with the part of speech known as the article (a, an, the).  For this posting, we will focus on the articles "a" and "an" used in a very specific phrase.
  Let's start with the word another.  According to the Random House Dictionary, this adjective means  1. a second; a further; an additional:  another piece of cake.  2.  a different; a distinct; of a different kind:  at another time; another man.  You know the word.  It was once actually two words:  an + other, and somehow got combined.
  What bothers me is when speaking, people break this word in two and add an additional (dare I say "another") adjective in between.  Here's what I mean:

Example:  On KABC Talkradio 790, a caller in July of 2012 was talking about the election and said, "A whole nother block of votes."

Example:  The episode of "Shark Tank" airing on October 5, 2012 had an update on Villy Custom bicycles.  The owner, Fleetwood Hicks, said, "Being on 'Shark Tank' has really allowed us to take Villy Customs to a whole nother level."

Example: Talk show host Steve Harvey said on January 14, 2013, "Making a new year's resolution is easy. Now keeping it, that's a whole nother story."

Example:  Also heard on Steve Harvey's talk show, a woman who asked for help in de-cluttering her house says to the expert Monica, after showing her several cluttered spaces:  "We have a whole nother room to look at."  Yet later in that episode, Monica's team is cleaning when one of her employees says, "Monica, we've got another space to do."  And at the end of the segment, Steve addresses the husband's pack-rat mentality by saying, "You were a borderline hoarder.  A couple more months, we would have had you on another show."

  Do you see what I mean?  If you break apart the word "another", you are left with a + nother
and there is no such word in the dictionary.  It still does not exist if you put an adjective in between.  But if you notice the last two highlighted words in the last example, you will see that people actually do know the word another and how to use it.

   Now here are some examples of how to use this expression correctly.

Example:  In the novel All Over But the Shouting by Rick Bragg, the author talks about being a journalist covering football games, an escape from his tough Southern life.  He says, "For me, that escape took on a whole other meaning."

Example:  Narrator Alec Baldwin on Frozen Planet's "The Ends of the Earth" says, "The Antarctic takes things to a whole other level."

Example:  Geraldo Rivera, host on KABC Talkradio said, "That's a whole other story."

Example:  On tv's The Middle, episode "The Second Act", sophomore daughter Sue Heck describes her freshman mentee Jenna to her parents:  "She's doing really well in school, but Homecoming Court is a whole other thing."  Congrats to the young lady (by way of her writers) who got it right.

   My point here is this:  If you wish to break up the expression another and add whole in between,
the article "an" (in front of other) is no longer in front of a vowel (see February 2013's post).  It is now in front of whole.  Therefore, other remains intact.  Hurray to the last four examples!
   Besides the above correct examples, there is another whole way to express it.  That's right, use another in front of whole and then the word(s).  This works too. 

   This is not a new tendancy.  The word "apron" came from the Middle English "napron".  Its origin is also from the French "nappe," meaning "tablecloth".   When it was spoken as a napron, you guessed it - eventually it became an apron.  So much for keeping our language pure, am I right?