It’s funny to read the comments and find that nobody is bothering to read any of the cites before throwing in exactly the same old disproven folk etymology. People are people!
The context seems to support the use of the phrase as a hyperbolic list length. The problem is that such a usage just pushes the issue back. Why nine yards for a length? Nine yards is not a common length or common usage of any kind. The “to the nines” is one example of an ultimate, but sevens are much more common. To me that suggests that the nine is a specific reference that we haven’t yet discovered.
Ugh. Two errors. First the year is wrong and years may count heavily here.
Second, 1961 is the first year of the seventh decade of the 20th century. 1960 is the first year of “the 1960’s.” Far from being pedantic you’ve completely misunderstood the basics of the issue.
I found both the Michigan’s Voices and the Congressional hearing using a Google Books search, looking for the period of 1940 to 1960. Since the magazine article is under copyright, all I could see was a snippet of text. The Congressional hearing, though not under copyright, Google wouldn’t let me see at all, but a search of the title found me a scanned and OCRed copy at archive.org.
And yes, I was mixing up the two definitions of “decade” deliberately. And don’t forget that there is yet a third definition, which is the cultural “Sixties”. Use of the phrase “the 1960s” is dodgy anyway, as it implies a great degree of imprecision–I’d interpret it as a bit short of 3 significant digits.
–scot
“If you remember the sixties, you weren’t there.” --Robin Williams
9 cubic yards is about 6 ft by 6 ft by 6 ft. Assuming you use a liberal definition of “filled the car”, i.e. piled in a heap, then covered the hood and trunk as necessary, 9 cubic yards wouldn’t be absurd.
We just returned from Colonial Williamsburg, and we were told that in those days a woman’s ability to bear children was highly desired by a future mate, and since the width of a woman’s hips is supposedly an indication of such ability, the women took to wearing “hip extenders” (my terminology) under their dresses that made their hips appear to be much wider than they actually were.
We were shown such “extenders” hanging from the ceiling of the dressmaker’s shop. They were at least two and one half times as wide as I am, and I’m an adult male.
The ensuing dress would be made from a bolt of cloth and sometimes the whole bolt of cloth, all 27 feet of it, was needed. The whole nine yards.
They’re called “panniers”. Originally, panniers were practical baskets worn at the hips, but the name became attached to ornamental hip extenders. You may have heard of pannier baskets for bicycles (or motorcycles) or “pannier [steam railroad] engines”.
However, you seem to have picked up a rather silly version of the story. No man of the time was fooled by panniers, and it was a rare man of the time who went looking for a woman saying, “I want a good breeder,” in the first place (though his father sometimes did, if they were upper class). Rather, men are attracted, according to various different fashions in various different times and cultures, to nearly anything about women that is the opposite of mannish. Long hair. Breasts. Smooth and more or less hairless skin. Small arm muscles and small feet. Brainlessness (sorry, but it happens). And, yes, large hips (and narrow waists, which set off wide hips and large breasts). A man, as I say, wouldn’t be fooled by panniers, but his “hot chick” button could be pushed by them, all the same.
That would be great, except of bolt of cloth is not 27 feet. It is 120 ft, or 40 yards. Ergo, a whole bolt of cloth is not “the whole 9 yards”. It would be “the whole 40 yards”.