“I was sick the whole nine months of my pregnancy.”
“He spent the whole nine innings in the dugout.”
Eh, sounds like a pretty natural intensifier to me.
– Tammi Terrell
But those are durations of time, for which it is more natural, since they are more easily divisible. I don’t wash my whole nine shirts or send steel to the whole nine factories.
The whole nine factories completed their quota as expected.
The whole nine shirts were ruined when he bleached them.
He ran the whole 99 yards for a touchdown.
The golfer completed the whole eighteen holes before noon.
It took her all summer to read the whole six volumes.
I ate the whole seven doughnuts that were left.
I think the whole six divisions can reach Baghdad by nightfall.
It’s no more unnatural than using “whole” for a measure of length. I can’t think of anything that would be measured by yards which would naturally be specified by “the whole nine yards” rather than “all nine yards.” The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that the phrase sounds unnatural to me just by using “whole.” Perhaps in other people’s dialects “whole” is used differently, but to me the expression “the whole nine yards” is an odd way to say “all nine yards.”
In the conversation that precedes the use of “whole nine yards” there are a couple of references to production across the nine yards “as a whole” and production increases in seven of the nine yards. So the speakers were each trying to be specific which they were talking about: the seven plants or all nine. So when Admiral Land says “the whole nine yards” he may well have just been (consciously or unconsciously) echoing the usage “as a whole” in a slightly different way, even if it seemed a little awkward.
In fact, here’s what the OED has to say about this particular use of “whole” as an adjective.
I’m a speaker of American English, born and bred in central North Carolina, and the use of “the whole [number],” used in this manner, doesn’t sound odd to me, especially when emphasizing the entirety of the number of units. It’s something I’ve used myself, though I think I’d only use this in a casual, spoken context.
In any event, I really can see someone using the “whole nine [ship]yards” when referring to what’s expected of production of the group [of nine]. It’s not at all artificial to these ears. That it may sound awkward to others doesn’t, I think, effectively demonstrate that it may have been already some weird phrase that was floating around the Navy by 1942. Nor does this line of reasoning demonstrate that this construction (“the whole [number]”) was so unique that it may have served as the point of origin for a later expression.
– Tammi Terrell
With respect, no one I know would say, “I ate the whole eight donuts.” Just doesn’t happen.
But I think RJKUgly has hit upon a plausible explanation for the usage there of “whole.”
I really agree with DSYoungEsq here. The majority of your examples, Tammi, sounded awkward to my ears. I guess that just goes to show that this is ultimately unresolvable. Awkward phrasings aren’t exactly unheard of in spoken testimony, though, so I think the burden is on those of us who think this was not a coincidental use of the words.
On the other hand, the OED’s “the whole three” sounds just as awkward but, apparently, enough people use it to get it into the dictionary. I guess it’s a local usage.
Here’s a smattering of appearances in the popular press of the same construction. These are roughly contemporaneous with Admiral Land’s use of “the whole nine yards.”
So, despite the construction’s apparent clumsiness to some, it wouldn’t have been that unusual for Admiral Land to use it, even if Burton and Vickery hadn’t just mentioned “the[se] yards as a whole.” (By the way, Burton’s and Vickery’s uses of “yards as a whole” also came up in the ADS-L discussion.)
– Tammi Terrell
All of the constructions in Tammi Terrell’s post sound awkward to me. I wouldn’t say them that way. This is clearly a matter of dialect though. The fact that people used those constructions means that in some dialects they sound natural. I wonder if the construction with “whole” immediately preceding a number and then a noun is slowly dying out. If so, the expression “the whole nine yards” is (or is slowly becoming) a currently used phrase whose grammar is (or is becoming) obsolete. Such things happen sometimes.
One quick way we can reject the use of this phrase as an accidental coincidence is to see if the hearings focused on nine ship yards specifically. If it did, then the admiral was just referring to the collective set of ship yards, and this is not an intentional use of the phrase.
But if it did not (i.e. there were less or more shipyards being discussed), then clearly the use of phrase is intentional slang (and quite a good pun I might add) and not accidental.
What RJKUgly said in post 25. They’re discussing a set of nine shipyards. Sometimes the yards (or plants) referred to are only some of the nine, sometimes they’re the whole nine.
I accept Tammi’s citations, for what it’s worth. They don’t sound awkward to me; I have heard people speak that way.
What is less clear to me is how we got from the general case of using “whole [integer] [noun]s” to specific case “the whole nine yards”. Why did nine yards, of all combinations, become preserved as idiom?
Fish writes:
> Why did nine yards, of all combinations, become preserved as idiom?
That’s exactly what etymologists have been trying to understand. If you can figure that out, you will win the Nobel Prize in Etymology. (Well, if there was a Nobel Prize in Etymology you would, but Alfred Nobel’s wife had an affair with an etymologist, so Nobel nixed the idea of that prize.)
Some speculate that the number “nine” has been for hundreds? of years kinda a magical number. There is also the possiblity that it refers to an old joke in the military from the 1950’s.
As more and more newspapers/texts/sources get digitized, perhaps we’ll get a better grasp on it than we have at the current time.
Regarding the April 25, 1964 Tuscon newspaper reference I see mentioned here and there as the earliest known reference for “whole nine yards” used in the idiomatic way (instead of “all nine yards” in an earlier ref), can someone who has followed it tell me if the experts are aware that that April 25 report was just a reprint? I’ve found an April 18, 1965, version of the same article in the San Antonia Express/News, in which it is stated that the article is copyright by the World Book Encyclopedia Science Service, Inc., which means it probably spread it far and wide, which is a likely major vector in popularizing it.
Or football. When I first heard it in the early seventies it seemed to have a sarcastic hint to it, as if the person had fallen short of his goal, though that might just have been my interpretation.
It probably would have bugged him a lot more if the affair had been with an entymologist.
More precise Googling shows that my cite is already known about. Ah well.