As promised, here’s a quick summary of the (to) no end idiom.  In the original post, I asked what people thought of sentences like (1a) and (1b):

(1a) The crank insulted me to no end.
(1b) The crank insulted me no end.

Are they acceptable to you?  If so, what do they mean?  I’d figured that the answers would be pretty straightforward.  But, as it turns out, you readers are a far more diverse lot than I’d ever expected.  Thanks to that diversity, it’s now clear that these idioms are themselves far more diverse than I’d expected.  The range of views on the matter blindsided me, especially since I still think I hadn’t heard (1b) before a few weeks ago.

A few commenters were in the same camp with me, ignorant of no end. What surprised me is that they were geographically widespread; three were from the U.S. (Alaska, Pacific Northwest, and Mid-Atlantic), but one was from Canada, and one was from Australia.  A few were my evil twins, unfamiliar with to no end, or at least preferring no end over it; two from the U.S. and one from Canada.  So that’s weird, because I’d sort of suspected that the (1a)/(1b) distinction was one of those Anglo-American differences, but clearly members of both camps share North America.  (No Brits preferred to no end over no end, so there could still be some A-A effect.)

But — and I intend no offense to those of you who were mentioned in the preceding paragraph — the really interesting commenters were the ones who considered both (1a) and (1b) to be perfectly good ways of saying different things.  Apparently there is a sizable contingent of readers who think that (1a) and (1b) should be paraphrased as (2a) and (2b), respectively:

(2a) The crank insulted me without a goal or without achieving anything.
(2b) The crank insulted me endlessly.

I think that’s the meaning distinction people saw; it’s awfully hard for me to tell since I do not have such a distinction.  (I would use for no end to represent the meaning of (2a), which is where I’m getting my paraphrase from.)  At least two commenters felt this way, one from the Mid-Atlantic U.S. and one from the British Midlands.

I don’t know that there’s any great insight about usage to draw from this data, expect perhaps the greatest of all: each of us knows next-to-nothing about general English usage.  I think of myself as being pretty familiar with American English because I’ve lived in three corners of the country, have associated with the underclass, old money, and the nouveau riche, and have almost managed to figure out what might could means.  But I didn’t know anything about the variability in this idiom.  This serves as a reminder to would-be prescriptivists: you’d better do some research before you go around telling people what’s right and wrong in language.  No matter how much experience you have with the language, it’s always possible that your usage is the odd one out. Don’t trust someone’s prescriptions just because they seem like they know English well.  Make sure they’ve done their homework on it.

Or, in this particular case: dismissing either to no end or no end as bad English with just a sentence or two just makes you look foolish.