know-nothing and no-nothing

[Garson O'Toole]

When I came across "no-nothing" I thought of the "Know Nothing Party"
and the "know-nothings" of the 1840s and 1850s. The OED has entries
for know-nothing and know-nothingism. Wikipedia has an entry for "Know
Nothing" that discusses the political movement.

Here are some examples of "no-nothing":

1990 December 02, Los Angeles Times
A Nation of No-Nothings : America's Willful Ignorance of the World
Puts Us at Peril by Stanley Meisler
http://articles.latimes.com/1990-12-02/magazine/tm-7771_1_foreign-policy/7

The following might be a transcription error:
Sep 21, 2007 PBS transcript
Online NewsHour: Analysis: Shields, Lowry Discuss Debates
MARK SHIELDS: "No, but it's those other guys, those no-nothings on the
other side." And she did it on Iraq. She's doing it on health care.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/july-dec07/sldebate_09-21.html

2010 Jan 21, Salon website
Scott Brown -- the senator from unemployment
By Robert Reich
The Republicans won’t have easy sailing from here on, either. Brown’s
victory has given more muscle to the tea-partiers -- the rag-tag group
of angry no-nothings who are challenging mainstream Republicans in
primaries all over the country.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/feature/2010/01/21/brown_unemployment_open2010

Are there people using the term "no-nothing" who really want to use
"no" instead of "know", or is this just a misspelling? Is there some
eggcorn-type rationale for the term "no-nothing"? The term
"no-nothing" is sometimes applied to people who want to cut government
spending. In this case it might refer to people who say "no" to
spending, or people who wish to spend "nothing".

Even in the 1850s there was some disagreement over the name of the
political movement.

Cite: 1855 June 21, New York Times, It Won't be Let Alone, Page 4, New
York. (ProQuest)

In truth the Southern members of the Know-Nothing party, as well as
their friends in New-York, differ from the Northern members only in
the orthography of their political designation;-at the North they are
Know-Nothings; but, at the South, they spell the name No-Nothings. The
difference is not great, but it appears to be sufficient to cause a
split.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org