Unraveling "the whole nine yards"

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

Cecil last formally discussed the origin of “the whole nine yards” in 1987.

In tomorrow’s print edition of The New York Times, Jenny Schluesser describes recent developments in “whole nine yards” research, including the identification of an earlier form. (You’ll have to forgive me, but samclem and I get a little shout-out here. I’m posting this because I know quite a few of you are as interested in the roots of this idiom as we are.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/27/books/the-whole-nine-yards-seeking-a-phrases-origin.html?ref=arts

A link to Fred Shapiro’s article for The Yale Alumni Magazine is provided in The Times piece, but it’s also at the link below.

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Wow, that was unexpected development… Thanks for posting the update.

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Does this mean that if you go back to the 19th century, you’ll find people boasting about the whole three yards?

Seriously, nice detective work.

4

Thanks for posting, and nice job with the digging.

So if we go back far enough, will we find that the original was “the whole yard”?

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The coolest part afaic is that Samclem got a mention. :slight_smile:

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Ok, throwing something out there without support, but the article got me thinking.

The NYT article states, “But then Mr. Shapiro, searching in Chronicling America, a Library of Congress database of pre-1923 newspapers, found two 1912 articles in The Mount Vernon Signal in Kentucky promising to “give” or “tell” the “whole six yards” of a story.”

If the article is going to tell “the whole six yards of a story,” could the word ‘yard’ maybe have morphed from ‘yarn’, and the phrase once referred to a tale? Maybe it’s not just the number that’s changed.

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Interesting reading the comments below the article, where the posters one by one completely ignore all the actual evidence and citations in the story and go on to promote their own pet etymologies for the phrase with no support or evidence.

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Perhaps the popularity of this phrase increased with the inflation to nine yards instead of six. The whole six yards is not as mellifluous.

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Yeah, but Tammi was the one who really took it back to the beginning.

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I get the impression that “Tammi Terrell” is “Bonnie Taylor-Blake”.

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I doubt it. Just because this one instance refers to telling all the details of a story does not mean that the expression itself originated from telling all the details of stories. “The Whole Six Yards” just seems to mean “go all the way”.

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Let’s see:

1912: The whole 6 yards.
1956: The whole 9 yards.

So we should have:

2012: The whole 12 yards.

now.

And going back:

1850s: The whole 3 yards.
1810s: The whole 0 yards.

Oops. I think we’ve established a lower limit on the antiquity of the phrase.

It’s simple Math, people.

13

If you go digging through back episodes of the A Way With Words podcasts, there’s one on the history of jojos as a name for french fries that mentions both samclem and the SDMB.

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And samclem showed up in one of Bill Safire’s 2004 “On Language” columns, this time providing a very early usage of “the next big thing.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/30/magazine/the-way-we-live-now-5-30-04-on-language-the-new-black.html?pagewanted=2&src=pm

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Yeah, I had to help out poor Bill in the old days. :smiley:

I also got mentioned in his NYTimes column about “Charley Horse.”

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You’ll live a fuller and happier life if you just never ever read comments on any article anywhere ever. Period.

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Even here?
Powers &8^]

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Ain’t Tammi grand? (And you too, Sam!) In the future annals of the digging out of this phrase’s roots (and, believe it, those annals will be written) the names of Tammi, or rather Bonnie, and Sam will loom large.

What a fascinating development.

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Skammer writes:

> Interesting reading the comments below the article, where the posters one by
> one completely ignore all the actual evidence and citations in the story and go
> on to promote their own pet etymologies for the phrase with no support or
> evidence.

Below what article? There are no comments on the article in The New York Times and only one on the article in The Yale Alumni Magazine.

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The NYT article has 153 comments beneath it as of now. You may need to click something to see them. I didn’t see them at first then they appeared, although I’m not quite sure what I did.