Is it “Check and mate” or “Checkmate”?

I found the expression “Check and mate!” in the following sentence describing furious exchange of words between CNN host Piers Morgan and rightwing radio host and anti-gun-control propagandist Alex Jones on gun-control in the video titled “Shoots off his mouth on Piers Morgan” in Time magazine’s (Jan 8) Entertainment Section.

When Morgan managed to work in a question like, “How many gun murders were there in Britain?” Jones answered, “How many great white sharks kill people and yet they’re afraid to swim?” Check and mate!

From the definition of ‘checkmate” in Cambridge English Dictionary, "noun (2) a situation in which someone has been defeated or a plan cannot develop or continue", it is obvious that “check and mate” here means Jones’s answer was the finish blow that shut Morgan’s mouth up.

However, I was unable to find “check and mate” in any of Cambridge, Oxford, and Merriam-Webster English dictionary, though they all register “checkmate.”

Google Ngram registers “check and mate” at an average 0.00000006 incidence level since circ 1850, but I don't know how significant this number is.

Can I use “check and mate” interchangeably with “checkmate” to mean being driven into a corner?

Oishi-san, "Check and mate!" is just a way of drawing out the word checkmate to make it sound more dramatic.

In American English, we often split words and put whole words in between the parts

That's fan-freakin'-tastic [That's fantastic]

or draw the syllables themselves out for emphasis

That is one bee-yooo-tiful car! [That is one beautiful car]

(Remember that English is unlike Japanese in that vowels can be of any duration.)

I'm a chess player and saying "check and mate" only happens in films or on TV, or people just trying to add humour in a friendly game. The word checkmate is not derived from check, it's from the Persian shah-mat (the king is dead). Good players never announce check or checkmate when playing each other.

The term checkmate is an alteration or Hobson-Jobson of the Persian phrase "Shāh Māt" which means, literally, "the King is helpless" (or "ambushed", "defeated", or "stumped", but not "dead").

-Wikipedia entry for "Checkmate" (emphasis mine)

I hope chess fans will forgive me for oversimplifying the rules and terminology of chess.

Short answer: checkmate is really an abbreviation for check and mate. We can use the expanded form for emphasis.

Long answer:

In chess, the objective is to capture your opponents King but, because it is a game played by gentlemen, the game stops at the point just before the King is captured.

The situation in which the King is under direct threat is called check ("the King is in check"). The player whose King is in check must get his King out of check immediately. If he cannot, he loses.

The end of the game is known as mate. There are two kinds of mate:

• stalemate -- a draw
• checkmate -- a player cannot get his King out of check

So checkmate is pretty much synonymous with check and mate.

An analysis of the technical meanings of 'check', 'mate', and 'checkmate', and how people use them in the game (those are different) is good motivation for how to solve the problem. But it doesn't address how non-players mean and use those words metaphorically.

To non-players, 'check' means "I've put you in danger (but I'm not sure if there's an escape)", 'checkmate' means "I've won the argument/situation". 'Mate' is just not used alone in this context. 'Check and mate' means "I've cornered you -and- there's no escape" or "I've finished my argument and you have no means of rebuttal"..

No one would say 'mate' alone to signify that they've won an argument. The clever word play is that one leads with 'check' to worry the other and then ends with the final blow that they've succeeded.

(in this example, it is somewhat difficult to understand who is involved with the sharks, but 'they' are the people who might swim)

It's worth noting that the first definition in OED for mate is for the chess-related context...

The state of the king when he is in check and cannot move out of it (involving the loss of the game to the player whose king is so placed): = checkmate.

So “check and mate” is effectively tautological repetition for emphasis - which is in no way, shape or form unusual in English. And OP's figurative use of a chess-related expression has a counterpart deriving from tennis tournaments...

“Game, set and match!” (also often used figuratively in similar situations to indicate total victory).