No, I don’t think I have an answer, but I have an observation which might relate.
The other day I was watching a MASH rerun, and a bit of the dialog reminded me that a yard used to be a slang term for $100. Truthfully, I’ve never heard it actually used outside of fiction - if it ever really had widespread use it went out of, um, “currency” rather before my time.
Questions that occur to me:
[ul][li]Where did this use of “yard” come from?[/li][li]Is it related to “the whole nine yards”?[/ul][/li]
I’ve never heard this brought up in numerous discussions of the nine yards question. Perhaps trying to figure out why $100 was a “yard” would give us a context in which $900 was significant.
The variant I heard is that “the whole nine yards” is of Scottish origin. Apparently, there are several different types of kilts, with the largest and most ceremonial one being called a “great kilt”. A great kilt was, of course, 9 yards long when laid out straight, while other kilts were of lesser lengths.
I have no idea if there’s any truth to it. It’s just the theory that I’ve heard.
I can’t vouch for its validity, but the story I heard about the origin of the phrase, “The whole nine yards”, is as follows:
During WWII the machine guns in the US bomber aircraft (B17s, B25s?) sent to bomb Nazi Germany had belts of ammunition that were nine yards long. If the mission met with a lot of resistance from fighter aircraft and the gunners went through the entire belt of ammo, the’d say they went through “The Whole Nine Yards”.
Hence, the origins of the phrase meaning, “Completely” or “Totally” or “All the way”.
Opps, sorry about my earlier post which was obviously a repeat of things that had been earlier covered on a different, but same, thread. Didn’t see the earlier thread until I’d already made my post.
Do I get an extra measure of forgiveness for being a newbie?
Gee, I didn’t want to rehash the whole previous discussion, just address my specific question, which is a wrinkle I hadn’t heard brought up here, or in half a dozen other places. Does a yard = $100 have anything to do with it, and where does a yard = $100 come from?
The OED says that a “yard” is an American slang word for either a hundred or a thousand dollars. It’s first attested in 1926. They don’t have any guess at why this term developed. I can’t see any obvious connection with “the whole nine yards”. Why is $900 or $9000 significant?
However, let me make a guess about why a hundred or a thousand dollars became known as a “yard”. If you trace the word “yard” back in English, it originally meant “stick” and then “measuring stick”. Before settling on meaning just the current distance (three feet), it was also used for other distances, like 5 1/2 yards, which is now called a “rod”. It seems that the phrase “yards of X” was used to mean just “a whole lot of X”, without specifying exactly how much. The idea was that a hundred dollars or a thousand dollars was a lot of money (and it certainly was in 1926).
Let me really go out on a limb now and make a suggestion for the origin of “the whole nine yards”. Sometimes people who are surprised or shocked by something will say somethng like that they felt like they “were hit by a 10-ton weight”. In old Warner Brothers cartoons they sometimes show characters hit by falling 10-ton weights. Why that much? Surely getting hit by, say, 500 pounds on the head would kill you.
So my theory is that people were saying originally that they were being given yards and yards of rigamarole about some subject - in other words, a long explanation or excuse that they didn’t want to listen to. At some point it became standard, for no good reason, to say that one was given nine yards of explanation about the subject. The “nine” in the phrase thus arose purely by chance, not by reference to any specific nine yards.
