The site mentions that the origins of this phrase are from the use of fabric for certian events but i think this is the true answer from a good friend of mine:
"I know it authoritatively, having served in the military. I first heard it during the Korean War from Navy pilots who flew F6F Hellcats in the Pacific Theater. The standard ammo belt for the fixed fifty-caliber machine guns used on fighter aircraft were, when loaded, 27 feet in length, or of course, nine yards. When you met a Jap at 10,000 feet and really spashed him, you gave him the “whole nine yards” of belt ammo. It was common bragging. "
And the conclusion on that website is pretty similar to Cecils – they say " all we can agree on is the fact that no one can agree. The origin remains in obscurity and will almost certainly stay there."
Welcome to the Straight Dope Message Boards, yohann, glad to have you with us.
When you start a new thread, it’s helpful to others if you provide a link to the column that you’re talking about. Helps keep everyone on the same page, saves time searching, etc. No biggie, you’ll know for next time, and t-bonham has kindly provided the link for you.
Second, you’ve put this in the wrong forum. Since it’s a comment about one of Cecil’s columns, I am moving it to the proper forum. You might want to take a minute or two to read over the forum descriptions for future. Again, no biggie, and welcome!
The problem with the war-plane thing is the dates. (And, by the way, it’s most often heard about WWII, not the Korean War.)
The first appearance in print of “whole nine yards” is roughly the early 1960s (I think about 1962 or '63, from memory.) It is extremely doubtful that an expression that was common during the Korean War (which ended in 1953) would have gone for a decade without finding its way to print. (It is of course even less believable that a WWII expression could have gone for that long without being printed somewhere.)
In short, while no one (so far as I know) has disputed the length of the ammo belts, neither has anyone shown any credible evidence that this is the source of the expression.
(We have discounted the story that this was derived from archaeology, where to put an ancient piece of pottery together requires at least nine pieces, hence the origin was “the whole nine shards.”) ::: ducking :::
A friend of mine is into something called “Horse Pulls” that are popular at county fairs here in the mid-west. I went to one. The object is to take a team of large draft horses, hitch them up to a “sled” that can accept progressively heavier weight. Each team pulls the weighted sled as far as possible. The team that pulls the heaviest weight the full track distance wins.
You guessed it. The track distance was, for some reason, twenty-seven feet. I was told that this distance never varies from fairground to fairground. In any event, I actually heard the announcer state, several times mind you, that one team or another had “pulled the whole nine yards”. Since this activity has been around forever, it seems like it might be a logical place for the birth of the phrase.
The distance varies depending on the rules of the Association sanctioning the event, but I don’t know of any that are 27 feet. But a distance of 27-1/2 feet (11 paces) is a very common one.
Some examples:
North Idaho Fair: “each team pulls the sled for 12 feet”.
Southern Draft Horse Assn: “full pull is a 20 foot pull of the stone boat”.
Maine Draft Horse & Ox Assn: “total of 25 ft in the first minute”.
St. Louis County, MN: “A complete pull is 27 - 1/2 continuous feet”.
South Caroline State Fair: “Pulling distance to be 27 1/2 feet for horses and 15 feet for mules”.
Minnesota Horse Pull Assn rules: “The required distance to pull is 27 1/2 feet.”
Wisconsin Horse Pullers Assn rules: “distance to pull is 27 1/2 '.”
My draft horse friend says that the extra six inches doesn’t actually count for the length of the pull. It has something to do with compensating for the size of the hitch (or something… I admit that I am hardly an authority on this and I didn’t really think too hard about it). Also, if you will notice from the list you provided, in the MIDWEST (as I mentioned) the length does stay the same. That would lend itself to a regional standard.
In any event, I must again point out that, vagaries aside, the announcer repeatedly shouted to the (believe it or not, thousands of) people in attendance that one team or another pulled “the whole nine yards”. I heard him. Therefore, I suspect that midwestern farmers have been saying that at county fairs for a very long time.
Well, if you heard him saying that in 1960, maybe. But the reverse could well be true – when the expression “whole nine yards” started to become popular, the announcers thought it would be cute to use it for their horse-draggin’s.
Of course that is possible (that the announcer copied, rather than invented the phrase), but you could say that about any possible explanation. The nature of the event also lends itself to a rapid bout of cultural diffusion: A competitive, special (county fair comes once a year) activity that thousands of people witness, and talk about at the feed store and barbershop for the next week or so. It just seems like the phrase (which, in pop culture, means to go the distance or to complete a task) would spread rapidly under such circumstances. Think of all of the other phrases that arose from agraian American culture (the well has run dry, priming the pump, roll in the hay, stubborn as a mule, etc.)
In a more modern, urban, sense consider the frequency in which cute Sportscenter phrases find themselves repeated around the watercooler at work. This is the explanation that makes the most sense to me.
I don’t mean to suggest that this PARTICULAR announcer (or any announcer) invented the phrase. Just that it seems very likely that it is connected with this activity.
Well, it does make more sense than a lot of the theories that have been put forward, and deserves looking into, IMHO.
But…why no appearance in print until the '60s, when the rural culture was in decline?
Strictly anecdotally, I grew up in rural Ontario, with a father who loved horse pulls, and don’t remember hearing the expression until I was an adult, and then only in its current free-floating context.
First appeared in print in the 1960’s? How do you know that?
Somebody else pointed out that, outside of the midwest, the distance varies. It is possible that the horse pulls up in Canada (the ones your father attended) were not 27 feet in length.
Well, it’s what Dex says earlier in the thread, and what the estimable samclem has said repeatedly in threads on this subject. Admittedly, I’m taking it on faith, but I’m prepared to believe them until someone produces evidence to the contrary.
I dunno. This is one of those things that seems impossible to solve. It just seemed to me that all of the pieces for this explanation somehow fit. I think that the machine-gun idea is a reasonable one also, but since I actually HEARD the horse people repeating this over and over, it just had the ring of truth.
Billowen, I’m no etymolygist, and I have no idea whether the explanation you propose is correct. But let me just say how refreshing it is to actually see a new explanation posited for this phrase. You don’t know how many times we see someone post “No, the report is wrong! I know the answer! It’s ___!”, where the blank is something that we’ve already debunked about fifteen thousand times before. But this is the first time I’ve ever seen the horse-pull explanation.
The problem with the “standard length of a belt of ammunition” origin is that there is no standard length for a belt of machine gun ammunition. Ammo belts are not a fixed length - each round is individually attached with a metal link that connects it to the previous round. 50-cal belts were usually supplied in 50 or 100 round lengths, but could be assembled to any required length. The amount of ammo carried by a particular aircraft tends to be standardized to a certain number of rounds (and the magazines/storage space is sized for the designed ammo load) but this standard differs from plane to plane and even for different guns on a single plane.
Standard ammo loads for US WW2 aircraft armed with 50-cal machine guns include:
Bookkeeper, that’s great info. Do you happen to have a source or cite that we can check on? … and, of course, the real question is not how many shots per round, but how long the belts are.
I pulled the info from my collection of “Aircraft in Profile” publications (unfortunately now long out of print). These are short monographs on specific aircraft, sometimes specific models of an aircraft, and have useful technical info such as this included.
My intended point was that, since the size of a 50-cal round and the associated link are standardized, the varying number of rounds per gun in the ammo belts indicates varying lengths, and argues against there being an accepted standard length for an ammo belt in a fighter aircraft. The only “standard ammo belt” I have come across are the 100-round and 50-round belts packed into the standard sizes of 50-cal ammo boxes, and these would be much shorter than 27 feet long.
If we take 1" as a rough estimate of the width of a complete 50-cal round+link (perhaps someone with access to an actual round can give a more accurate measurement than I can come up with from years-old memories), then 9 yards works out to around 326 rounds. This doesn’t match up with the figures given above.
For those who are unfamiliar with aircraft machine gun ammo belts, there are some pictures of link-type ammo belts about halfway down on this page. These are 30-cal, but very similar to the 50-cal belt.
This is hardly what one would call “verifiable” evidence, but I know a gentleman who just turned 82. He scored 12 kills during WW2 in the south pacific before being shot down and paralyzed below the waist. I asked him about the belt length question. His answer is quite interesting.
He said the belts were indeed exactly 27 feet long. It appears all the feed mechanisms for the guns worked the same. The ammo belts used were standardized. The only difference was the rounds installed into the belts. The mounting clips could shift down the belt to accommodate larger or smaller ammo. Since the ammo storage space in any given plane was different, certain lengths of the belt were at times left empty, and late in the war sometimes more than one belt was used per gun.
Only certain planes could take exact belts filled completely with ammo. He wasn’t sure which, but he knew his Corsair couldn’t. He could only get about ¾ of a belt per gun. He remembered how the ground crew always took a lot of grief from the new pilots because they were always claiming they got short belts. The real reason was they just blasted all their ammo on the first pass, but none of the pilots would ever admit they were wrong.
He also recalled a fight in a bar in Hawaii, when a pilot from the European Theater mentioned his Thunderbolt could mount nearly two belts per gun. When the Navy boys pointed out they had a better kill/loss ratio with half the ammo and a quarter the armor, it was a brawl that sent a dozen men to the infirmary.
As a side note, it sort of made me sad to speak with him. He’ll not be with us very much longer as he is very sick, and there is a whole wealth of information that will be lost when he goes. That’s a real shame.
While I have no personal experience in this area, aircraft, especially military aircraft, have been a favoured interest for many years. It is my impression that most ammo belts were made up on site by the unit armourers. IIRC there was a mechanical belt linker used by the USAAF/USAF during the WW2 & Korean War period, which was operated by filling one hopper with rounds of ammunition, and the other with the applicable size of links, turning a crank, and the assembled belt would start coming out one side of the device until you stopped cranking or filling the hoppers.
I think Daniel-E’s source may be in error about some things. By WW2 all fighters (definitely all US fighters) were using “disintegrating link” ammo belts for machine guns (cannon were less standardized). These belts are formed by first sliding a round into one side of a link, then matching the link up to the opposite side of another link and sliding a round into the two to join them (sort of like putting a hinge pin into the two parts of a door hinge). Then another round and link are added and so on until you have the desired length. When the round is fired, and the empty case is extracted, the links fall apart (hence “disintegrating link”), and both the link and the case drop out openings in the bottom of the wing. You can’t leave a length of the belt empty, because without the round there is nothing to hold the links together. Old-fashioned fixed length canvas belts may still have been used for some purposes, but not on fighters. Perhaps for the rear gunner’s machine guns on older Navy dive bombers and torpedo planes? As noted in my earlier postings, the F4U Corsair carried 6 50-cal machine guns with either 400 or 375 rounds per gun.
HOWEVER, having said all of the above in argument against the existance of a “standard ammo belt” length, I now think that there is a good argument for an ammo belt origin for the phrase. Having just now (in the middle of this posting) found a diameter of .81" quoted for a 50-cal round here, I note that the most common ammo amount listed for WW2 US fighters in my reference books is 400 rounds (although this does not appear to be a fixed standard as there are numerous examples of different lengths). If we multiply 400 x .81", the result is 324" or nine yards. This doesn’t allow for the slight extra thickness of the link (assuming that the quoted .81" doesn’t already include this), but it certainly lends a lot of weight in my mind to the length of a commonly used ammo belt (if not the mythical “standard ammo belt”) as the origin of the phrase.