Forgive me if there is another topic on these forums related to the origin of “the whole nine yards” article; unfortunately, the search function is not working for me at the moment.
To find a print reference to the phrase prior to 1967, I turned to Google Books’ search function. This will conduct a search on all publications for which Google has scanned and tagged keywords. I asked for all items that use the phrase “whole nine yards” in items published between 1900 and 1967. It gave me 5 pages of references. However, most of them were periodicals that had started between 1900-1967, but the edition that contained the phrase occurred outside this period.
Guests can’t search, Robert The Rebuilder, but there have been many threads on this. This is a recent one. The poster (and moderator) samclem takes an interest in such matters and reading his posts there, it looks like you may well be onto something.
I did a bit of further searching – it may be that this is a clue. However, I suspect it’s not ammunition belts he’s talking about, or 91.44cm yards at all. The subject of the interchange appears to be shipyards.
Well done indeed! I don’t know if it gives more weight to the “length of a gunner’s ammo belt” theory, but the type of quote definitely matches other quotes seen from the 1960s, namely that it is being used by US military personnel.
Further searching reveals that [ul]
[li]I was right about shipyards, and[/li][li]the issue was raised on the American Dialect Society’s email list a little over a year ago.[/li][/ul]
The problem with items like this is that nine yards, whether you are talking about sailing, linear or cubic yards of anything, or even the grassy areas of a part of a city block, is a pretty generic quantity and and you can refer to all of it without meaning anything like the common meaning of “the whole nine yards” as all of something that is not actually measured in yards. Robert the Rebuilder’s link appears to be one of those, though without context (and I’m not paying Amazon 30 bucks to see it in context) I cannot dismiss it.
If you polled the linguists over at the ADS, they suggest(politely) that this1942 cite is merely a case of the words being used, but not in the slang way that it was in the 1960s. This 1942 cite was brought up in 2006(I think) by Stephen Goranson, from Duke. He’s really a good researcher. But, he earlier was stuck on the theory that the phrase referred to the nine Montagnard tribes in Vietnam. I don’t believe he had a supporter on the list who thought this was an early use of the phrase.
In the interest of fleshing out what was discussed on the ADS-L with respect to this particular (1942) appearance of “the whole nine yards,” I’ll offer up Stephen Goranson’s earlier posts (in the same discussion),
Thanks for posting those links, Tammi. After reading the last few posts in that thread, it does seem like there is support for Admiral Long’s use of the phrase as slang rather than accidental use (being that they’re talking about shipyards). Whether he coined it at that time will remain in dispute until an earlier reference is found.
I respectfully disagree with your assessment, Robert. The Admiral was in no way using the phrase “the whole nine yards” in those hearings in any conceivable meaning related to the useage that came about in the early 1960s.
It’s taken 40+ years to get it back from 1966-7(in Doom Pussy) to 1962(found by Tammi).
Anything is possible, but it’s not likely. There’s no reason to believe that this congressional hearing was well publicized. There’s nothing about the way the phase is used to suggest that it was likely to be interpreted as being the present-day figurative meaning. Like any other figurative phrase, “the whole nine yards” hae both a literal and a figurative interpretation. Doubtlessly the phrase had been used in a literal sense many times before the figurative meaning was developed. There’s no reason to think that it was used in the figurative sense here or that anyone understood it as being anything except the literal meaning.
Someone please explain to me who in the world would say “the whole nine yards” when referring to “all nine yards?” That’s not a natural construction in any way. This leads one to suspect that the use of “the whole nine yards” in this context was a usage of a phrase with an established meaning, if only among the people involved at the time with the effort.