know-nothing and no-nothing

[Jonathan Lighter]

 It wouldn't surprise me if a minority of the population believed
that "no-nothing" means "an inconsequential person; cipher."

JL

On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 11:53 AM, Garson O'Toole
<adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Garson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      know-nothing and no-nothing
>
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>
> 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.
>
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