The discussion about the origin of the expression – Cecil eventually cited someone who said the expression didn’t exist (in print, anyway) until the 1960s. Anyone got an earlier appearance?
He was responding to a plausible-sounding explanation that World War II ammunition belts for 50-cal machine guns happened to be nine yards long, and if you were really trying to hit something you fired the whole belt. How many bullets in nine yards – maybe 200? How many seconds of firing would that be?
Have you tried doing a search for the term?
Original link is in this thread. Short answer: We still don’t know that it means anything specific.
see this for a good overview of recent updates.
https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/whole-nine-yards
No real refence to any particular measure of anything.
A .50 cal. ammo belt for a M2 (known as a Ma Deuce) is eight foot long. 100 rounds per linked belt I’ve handled thousands of them. Of course, you can link multiple belts together. There are some older packaging configurations with more such as for aircraft and a gatling style multi-barrel gun.
That’s nice, but can you make any of that add up to “the whole nine yards”?
Something I’ve not been crazy about (I admit that I’m biased) is that the Wikipedia page for this expression credits “The Judge’s Big Shirt” (1855) as point of origin for the idiom, at least in two places on that page.
We’ve known about that 1855 “joke” for a long time, but never could (still can’t) draw a direct line between the phrase’s use in the anecdote and the so-far-earliest known use of the phrase as an idiom (1907; “the full nine yards”). Also hard to explain is the near-simultaneous (ca. 1910) idiomatic use of “the whole six yards.” What influence did “The Judge’s Big Shirt” have on the formation of the overall idiom if we have “the whole six yards” as an idiomatic form by ca. 1910? How did we lose three yards?
I agree that the 1855 usage is not the later idiom. I like better the prototype from 1850 you gave in the other thread. It uses just a reference to someone’s “nine yards,” meaning an exceptionally long letter to the newspaper in a feud they were having in it, rather than “the whole nine yards,” but certainly is used idiomatically much the same as the later finds rather than a reference to physical cloth. Someone should get that into the Wikipedia article.
I’m with you. We can’t overlook that 1850 Missouri usage of “your nine yards” and “your last nine yards.” I’ve come to look at such “yards”-based examples as indicating “the long version.”
Some time ago I found the following in a July 1855 issue of a Leicester (England) newspaper. It too uses “nine yards” with an apparent allusion to wordiness or at least to mean “not being direct,” but I’ve not found other examples.
He says ‘Pray short, I tell you; let’s have some of that holy ghost stuff – not go nine yards round; let’s have some of that holy ghost stuff.’ He commanded every body to kneel down and pray.
On the other hand (there’s always an other hand), Peter Reitan has gathered some evidence that late 19th-c commercially available dress patterns frequently involved nine yards and, separately, six yards of fabric. (And the earliest example of the idiom that we have so far appeared in 1907.)
So, while I’m holding onto to a possible “X yards = long version” basis for the idiom, I haven’t quite discarded a generalized fabric-based explanation. Unrelated to “The Judge’s Big Shirt,” that is.
Shrinkflation