I was speaking to a friend’s father who was in the US Army Air Force during WWII.
As a gunner of 50cal. machine guns, the ammo was in belts of twenty seven feet (about 350 rounds) or nine yards. When firing the whole belt and hit or missed a target the expression was “I gave it the whole nine yards!”. Can anyone historically verify the number of rounds and length of the belt of a 50cal. in aircraft to anti- air defense?
Moved ATMB -> GQ.
-xash
Administrator
This might be of interest:
With apologies to shuffledigfoot, I’ve moved this to Comments on Cecil’s Columns. xash already has provided a link to Cecil’s original column.
I’d be surprised if this column hasn’t generated the most interest of all of them. We’ve probably had 20+ threads in the last 11 years concerning the matter. I’ll try to provide a link to one that specifically addresses the ammo belt question.
Bottom line is–there’s no way this phrase goes back to WWII. It just doesn’t. We’ve got it back to about 1960(and this only in the last 2-3 years).
Yeah, this comes up often, and this ammo belt length “explanation” shows up a lot. Here’s the most recent, from December. Post 4 there gives links to a bunch of previous threads. I’ll just quote it here for convenience.
Anything that helps keep the phrase “Doom Pussy” from dying out of the lexicon can’t be all bad.
I don’t know if this explanation is in any of the above links, but Michael Quinion at his wonderful WorldWideWords site believes the phrase may have originated around 1955 (in an off-colour joke).
That story contradicts itself rather amusingly in the first paragraph.
I’ve read it several times and I don’t see where the contradiction is. Please explain.
“good margin” “close second”
shuffledigfoot, let’s summarize in order to give you the answer to your question. No, the phrase “the whole nine yards” doesn’t come from the length of an ammunition belt in World War II. No one knows where the phrase originated. There are no known written references to it until the 1960’s and not very many even then. There are seven known written references to it between 1962 and 1967. There are some claims from people that they heard it earlier, but memory is a tricky thing. In each of these memories, it’s possible that they are unconsciously inserting a reference to “the whole nine yards” into a story that they are remembering from several decades before. The phrase didn’t really become popular until the 1970’s.
Some of the written references to “the whole nine yards” from the mid-1960’s seem to come from sources more or less related to the U.S. Air Force. I suspect that what happened was that someone in the Air Force heard the phrase “the whole nine yards” and decided to make a joke about it originating as a reference to the length of ammunition belts in World War II. Other people in the Air Force heard him talking about it and didn’t realize that it was a joke, so they spread the story.
Incidentally, the origin of this phrase has been studied an enormous amount. In saying that only seven written references to it between 1962 and 1967 have been found, I should make it clear that this is despite the fact that with the increased power of computer searches, it is a lot easier to search even obscure written material from that time. The origin of “the whole nine yards” is probably the single greatest open problem in the etymology of American English. Anyone who solves it will win the Nobel Prize in Etymology.*
*Well, O.K., you can’t win a Nobel Prize in Etymology because there isn’t one, but that’s only because Alfred Nobel’s wife had an affair with an etymologist, so he cancelled his plans to create a Noble Prize in that field.
I wish people would stop saying “it doesn’t come from <fill in the story du jour>.” If we don’t know where it came from, we can’t say that it didn’t come from anything occuring prior to the references we do know about. We can say, “there is no evidence that that is the explanation, and we consider it unlikely to be the correct one because …”
I tried out the new Google Books Ngram Viewer tool using the phrase “the whole nine yards”. The results support a 1960s era origin for the phrase.
Wow, what a great tool! Thanks for sharing that. I hadn’t heard of it before.
You should have checked back before 1900. 1700-1730.
GOOD MARGIN vs. CLOSE SECOND is the contradiction.
The earliest result I see there is from 1960, in “Reference Quarterly”; it appears to be a journal published by the Reference Services Division of the American Library Association. Any librarians with access to back issues?
“No results found.” Yeah, that was illuminating.
I don’t remember if I’ve posted this before in one of the other similar threads, but what the hell.
My grandfather was in the Army Air Corps in WWII, and always insisted on the ammo belt theory. I absolutely believed him until I came here, and eventually found Cecil’s column. Alas, by then it was too late to tell him he misremembered.
The ngram tool says it’s there, but an actual text search finds only a few cases that have the individual words, “the”, “whole” “nine”, and “yards”. I suspect ngram may not understand that, when search cannot find a phrase at all, it backs off to the “all the words in any order” case.
On the other hand, if the story du jour is “It comes from the [something] industry, where an entire [object] uses 9 yards of [material],” and the fact is that an entire [object] only uses 2 yards of [material], I think it’s fair to stay that the story du jour is false.