did the whole nine yards issue ever get resolved

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
41

But suppose it entered the general language through an amusing public usage.

/urban legend warning

The way I heard it was that this came up during a divorce proceding. Something along the lines of a cement truck driver returning home and finding his wife in bed with someone else. As he stalked off in anger, he decided to pour cement into the convertible owned by his wife’s lover.

After he relayed this, the judge asked him how much cement he’d poured into the car – his answer: “the whole nine yards”.

The courtroom erupts in laughter and all attendees share this with their friends.

See http://www.snopes.com/love/revenge/concrete.asp for more info.

/urban legend warning end

Note that this also addresses the issue of variability in cement mixers. This version only requires us to assume that the driver knew the size of the particular truck he was using on that day.

Does this do anything for anybody? Okay, I know its based on a verifiable urban legend, but this was the way I learned the thing.

42

I’m sure we’ve recounted this in many threads devoted to this topic during the past 5 years. Search for them.

The phrase first appears in print in a semi-fictional book called Doom Pussy, written by Elaine Shepard, a US news reporter. She was one of the few female correspondants in Vietnam at that time. She actually lived(and loved?) with many of the Air Force flyers whom she weaves into her novel. One of her characters uses the phrase three times in the book, if my memory serves me. The next cite in print that has been found so far is from an Air Force Academy paper in 1968. The third oldest cite has been found recently by researcher Fred Shapiro. It appears in, of all things, a real estate advertisment in the Ft. Walton Beach paper in 1969. Interestingly, this is home of the Elgin Air Force Base in Florida.

So, we have three original cites, in three succesive years, all tied to the US Air Force.

Surprisingly, the Concrete Trucker’s News* didn’t use it once in that time frame. :rolleyes:

*If there truly is such a publication, I apologize to them.

43

Based on that, I’d say at this moment that is very strong evidence that it originates from the USAF.

44

It could well have originated in the Vietnam Era Air Force. But if it did- it had nothing to do with the length of MG belts being loaded into P51’s and such like, and they had been out of use for 20 years or so by then. What we’d need to see is how long the belts of 20mm cannon shells were in the Phantoms & suchlike then being used.

Of course, I will point out that the Air Force uses a lot of comcrete… :stuck_out_tongue:

45

Yeah, but I defy you to land an F-4 Phantom on a 27 foot runway…

46

Even the Word Detective is stumped by this one!

http://www.word-detective.com/back-s.html#yards

47

I’m not claiming that this has anything at all to do with the actual origin of the phrase, but when I was in the Air Force back in the mid '70s, we would send the newbies out to pick up such things as “prop wash” and “extra flight line” from the supply sergeant. When they asked how much flight line they should pick up, we would tell them to tell the sergeant we needed the whole nine yards. :stuck_out_tongue:

48

In the common way that I’ve always heard the phrase, it is simply “the whole nine yards” without any reference to giving. As in “he put all he owned into the truck - the TV, the sofa, all his bedroom furniture, the whole nine yards.” I don’t know that I’ve ever heard someone say that they were going to give the whole nine yards.

49

I don’t know. I woke up this morning a little hung over and when I read this thread this time I though of a Yogi-ism. .

50

Is that what you call it when it dries out on the bedsheet? :slight_smile:

51

I had no idea that there was such a hot debate on this matter until I looked up this website to prove to my colleagues that the P-51 Mustang origin was the correct one. I had never even heard of another theory of its origin.

Just a couple of notes for those of you who are obviously better than I am at this stuff: It is true that there were numerous versions of the .50 cal Browning machine gun installed on allied aircraft during WWII, but although the pilot was probably required to know exactly how many rounds each of his weapons carried, he probably had only a vague idea of the length of the belt, and if some guns had more than others on the same plane (which they did) he would probably refer to the longest one. If the wing cannons had six and the fuselage cannon had 8.673 (for instance) he was probably not going to say he went the whole six yards. If you operated a .50 cal in a helo or mounted on a ground vehicle or humped one on foot you definitely had a different weapon, since most of those are crew served (it takes two people to operate) which was not the case on a fighter. Since a pilot couldn’t stop what he was doing to fix a malfunction or reload, chances are this type of chain-fed ammunition was also quite different (any idea how much 9 yards of .50 cal weighs?). I’m guessing that those of you with more time on your hands could turn up some more definitive answers by researching this angle further.

Also, the fact that the phrase doesn’t turn up until the 60’s doesn’t really disprove the theory. When talking to my family and writing letters I don’t use terms like “8-up” or “high-speed” or “4th point of contact” because these are military slang that they don’t understand. The meanings and origins are not hard to track down, but they don’t turn up in print outside of the military very often. Has anyone checked to see where the earliest use of fubar or snafu appear in print, and does that mean that they were coined in the same year?

I really wish someone could get to the bottom of all this.

52

Snafu is cited from 1941. FUBAR is almost certainly derived from snafu. It shows up in 1944.

53

And were in widespread civilian use by the mid-50’s, to my certain knowledge, and probably earlier.

54

I can confirm that a 400-round belt of 50-cal ammo is indeed 9 yards long (based on measurement of a short length). 400-round belts were used by the P-51 Mustang and also by the F4U Corsair, both of which were in service in the Korean War after most of their WW2 contemporaries were long out of service. While this is no proof whatsoever of the origin of the phrase, if there is a USAF origin it may point to the Korean War rather than WW2 and would explain the lack of references from WW2, as well as providing a possible explanation for the appearance in general use in the '60s (less interaction between military and civil life than during WW2 and its aftermath would make for longer periods before military language moved over to civilian use).

55

You’re right that it doesn’t disprove this possibility, but it still is a theory with plausibility problems. Namely, that a) WWII was a well-documented affair (see the origins of snafu and fubar as examples), b) it was twenty years (!) before the phrase was ever written down, and c) it was twenty more years before anyone suggested the ammo belt explanation of the phrase.

So it is not disproven, but what we want is positive proof, or at least an explanation without these plausibility problems.

56

This is really farfetched, but I did find a reference, in a congressional hearing from 1942, with the phrase “the whole nine yards.”

From “Investigation of the National Defense Program: Hearings Before a Special Committee Investigating the National Defense Program, United States Senate, Seventy-Seventh Congress, First Session–Eightieth Congress, First Session,” which may be found in text form here: Full text of "Investigation of the national defense program. Hearings before a Special Committee Investigating the National Defense Program, United States Senate, Seventy-Seventh Congress, first session--Eightieth Congress, first session. S. Res. 71". The relevant text is as follows:
5192 INVESTIGATION OF THE NATIONAL DEFENSE PROGRAM

Admiral Vickery. Yes, sir.

Senator Burton. So that you have involved here a tremendous ex-
pansion in production, and you are shooting for a 50-percent increase
or more than a 50-percent increase in seven out of nine plants.

Admiral Vickery. That is right, and they have got to make that to
hit the schedules.

Admiral Land. You have to increase from 7.72 to 12 for the average
at the bottom of that fifth column, for the whole nine yards.

Senator Burton. That is pretty nearly twice.

Admiral Vickery. That is what we have got to do.
The topic under discussion seems to be output from naval shipyards, nine of which were producing Liberty ships. Whether this is the source of the idiom, I don’t know; it meets both the idiomatic sense, as well as a literal interpretation. It seems a bit obscure for a likely source of the phrase, but if nothing else, it tosses in yet another definition of “yard”…

The earliest reference I can find to a clear idiomatic use is from page 41 of Michigan’s Voices: A Literary Quarterly & Arts Magazine, 1960 v. 2:

“…status as a college professor and the whole nine yards…”

This is arguably earlier than “the 1960’s”, as 1960 is, to be pedantic about things, the last year of the 1950s, since people (other than computer programmers) tend to start counting with 1, not 0.

–scot

57

fluzwup, could you give us more context to the quote “…status as a college professor and the whole nine yards…”? Please quote at least the entire paragraph that it’s in. Also, how did you find that quote?

58

You can read this over at Ben Zimmer’s visualthesaurus. It details the last few finds.

59

An earlier discussion of the naval yards is here. The *Michigan Voices *thing is interesting, though, persuming it really is from 1960 (Google linkage).

ETA: I see samclem is on top of it.

60

[offtopic]No. 1960 is not part of the 1950s. That’s just silly.[/offtopic]