Cecil,
The ‘whole nine yards’ or the ‘full nine yards’ is the measure for a great kilt or Feileadh Mor. The modern kilt uses far less. I was really surprised that only a couple of comments referred to Scottish clothing. In old Scotland the yard was an ‘ell’ and it took nine of them to make a great kilt that pleated properly and left a plaid, pronounced ‘plyde’ to drape over a man’s shoulder as a cape/coat for inclement weather and believe me, Scotland has lots of inclement weather. The modern kilt was created by an English factory owner who hated watching his workers take time to adjust their plaids as they labored. I am amused that the 'full nine yards has become synonymous with going the distance or completing the job. Anyone who has worn kilts has likely heard the phrase in its original intent.
Cite, please? Where can we find reference of this use of “the whole nine yards” that predates other references?
You can likely find reference for this in any book on Scottish clothing but offhand I would direct an inquiry to Diana Gabaldon, who has extensively researched the history, customs and clothing of ‘me peoples’ through the middle to late Renaissance Periods. Likewise, direct a question to Ewan McGregor, Gerard Butler, Alan Cummings
or Sean Connery, all of whom have worn and heard the expression given to the kilt.
I’m not really interested in anecdotes from famous people. Can you show me a dated reference from before, say, 1950 that uses that expression in reference to kilt and/or kilt making?
You both missed this critical, very recent thread: Unraveling “the whole nine yards”.
In short, the origin of the phrase has been pushed back to the “whole six yards” which was in use by 1912. So no origin from nine yards of anything is going to be believed anymore.
Not that anyone seriously believed the kilt story anyway. It’s a good bit of folk etymology but nothing more. There’s only one way to do phrase origins and that’s to find them used in print.
I read that-great research. I was just seting the bar low enough for the poster to do some easy preliminary fact-checking.
To clarify this, the Scottish ell was 37 Scottish inches, or 37.059 Imperial inches, as opposed to the English ell, which was 45 inches.
Thanks for that, Exapno Mapcase. I should note that we don’t really know whether “the whole nine yards” was in use 100 years ago. Perhaps it co-existed with “the whole six yards” (or other undiscovered forms) and we haven’t yet found any remnants of it. Of course, it’s also possible that “the whole six yards” (and similar) truly was a precursor to “the whole nine yards” and that, as Fred Shapiro speculates, we have “phrase inflation” at work here.
The point stands, though, that at least we have a century-old variant involving “six yards,” which – as you point out – at least causes one to pause when considering any origin story involving nine yards [of whatever].
She said “remnant!” :smack:
Don’t give them an opening. 
I’ll be here all week! Try the veal!
So, you “knew” whereof you spoke. I suspected.
I could have said you were “Wong.” 
Hey, I refrained from calling the story a yarn!
‘Setting the bar low’. How condescending. Under ‘Tartan Navigator’ look up Linda Clifford, a Scottish and Irish merchant, who sells tartan materials. What I’ve known my whole life is difficult to prove without contention and it’s frustrating to have to find an answer that will satisfy your oh so critical evaluation. What I know for myself is that my grandmother was born well before the ammo belt of a spitfire was invented, (the last decade of the nineteenth century) and she was told by her grandmother of the length required to make a proper kilt. Maybe anything said will just be anecdotal to you but this is a fact of my upbringing. Fabric for a great kilt has always been four to five yards long by two yards in width. Merchants, a few of which were ready to short customers on total length had to be told ‘the full nine yards’ to know that nothing less would be tolerated by my thrifty ancestors.
You draw your own conclusions. I only put my two cents in (another phrase hard to pin down…hmm, ‘pin down’…)because I’d heard this from earliest childhood and felt I knew the answer. My answer certainly predates football, sailing tack and ammunition. How long have Scots worn kilts; how long have Celts worn their garb even before arriving in the British Isles? I put it on you to disprove me rather than dismiss what I know for fact but you do not. Thank you for allowing me my rant- I very much enjoy the general topics.
Theo macConnell Jr.
The problem is that the answer you’ve given has been researched and it isn’t correct. The evidence of the phrase used in written word clearly demonstrates that it has nothing to do with kilts. The phrase didn’t even start as “nine yards”, it started as “six yards” so that would invalidate your kilt theory before it even started.
Finding the origins of phrases cannot rely on legend and word of mouth, it has to be backed up by printed reference. In this case it’s abundantly clear that neither the kilt nor the ammo belt origins are true.
Could concurrence be possible for six yards and nine yards. In Scotland, nine. You say that the material for a kilt does not require nine full yards but you are not describing a great kilt or feileadh mor. I wear the great kilt on holidays. The modern kilt is an english bastardization of a scots garment which did and does require nine full yards. Your studied use of the phrase is of its looser, altered meaning of something all-inclusive. A new world meaning drawn from an old word expression used by a merchant and client in a specific environment. Disseminated by Scots in the western expansion of America, Scottish engineers would use the measure easily. Scottish tailors, farriers, brewers, bricklayers…all had heard the phrase their entire lives and took it for granted. Those not of Scots origin would find it colorful and apply it to mean something other than its true intent. As for it not appearing in print until the 40’s or 50’s, many things are taken for granted without comment- note the screwdriver which was in use for many years before anyone noticed that no patent had ever been issued for it. I’ve heard the expression ‘mad props’ for twenty years but only saw it in print six years ago. So what?
My thanks to Mr Kennedy for defining the Scots ell. Thank you also to Ms Terrell for inferring concurrence. My grandmother got the phrase from her grandmother well before 1950 but I have no idea if she ever wrote it down to be read by future generations of doubters and ‘shite heids’ as she would describe Czarcasm and Samclem. I am wondering why more Scots have not come into this debate because the phrase has existed for so much longer than the altered meaning that these gentlemen have been bandying about. If my great-great gran knew this in circa 1840, how much farther back might the phrase go. My five times great grandfather, John macConnell, came to America from Dumfries, Scotland in 1720 and settled in tuscarora, Pensylvania with his son, Alexander and a wife, Elizabeth. Do you expect that they took time from merely surviving to note the charming phrase ‘the full nine yards’? Has anyone tried to measure how much of day to day experience is lost to history because what everyone knew and took for granted was not usually commented on? My God, the Kennedy assassination is only about fifty years ago and nobody knows the particulars of that seminal event though millions claim intimate knowledge. Please forgive me for not being able to separate my feelings from my knowledge but what is asked for is definitive proof of something so basic to my family’s history that I never questioned it or even thought that anyone else would call me wrong for stating it. Puts me in mind of another phrase- “Damned if I do and damned if I don’t”. Oh well, thank you all for the dialogue- it was fun…sort of.
The reason we are skeptical, is that despite your anecdotes from your grandmother, no one ever recorded this phrase before about 1950. Do you believe your grandmother was the only person to use this phrase? Is it likely that a phrase commonly used to describe a great kilt would never be recorded, by anyone? That is why we aren’t buying it.
And by the way, we don’t allow personal insults here, even those relayed from your grandmother.
The problem with all that is that all the languages of Scotland (English, Scots and Gaelic) have been exceptionally well-served by etymologists over the past two hundred years. There hasn’t exactly been any shortage of work done on the subject. And, in the case of the monumental Scottish National Dictionary, that included extensive fieldwork undertaken precisely in order to record usages that had not made their way into print. So it is not merely that there is no record of the phrase in a Scottish context; it’s that the sort of research that would have been most likely to uncover it in use in Scotland was done at the time and yet those researchers never came across it. Why does speculation by you carry more weight than the hard graft of several generations of very fine Scottish scholars on the ground?
And, as a proud Scot, I would much rather that the genuine Scottish contributions to such fields as etymology, linguistics and folklore were properly appreciated (not least by Scots) than some spurious folk etymology.
“Mad props” in Spin Magazine, February 1993.
See how easy that was? Now, your turn.
This summarizes your entire false argument into one sentence. Your anecdotal experience means nothing compared to the sum total of all word use.
A check on Google ngrams quickly shows that mad props started hitting print in its current sense around 1993. Clicking on the 1993-1997 link brings up magazines like Vibe with regular use of it. (The earlier hits are for the use of props in stage performances that were bizarre or “mad”.)
All language use is parallel. Scholars and experts don’t just pluck out one phrase from the millions in language. They study them in droves because its easier to understand what might or might not be true for 101st phrase after checking out how the first 100 progressed.
Some general rules can be given. The first and foremost is that folk etymology is virtually always wrong. (Maybe even always always. I can’t think of an exception, but samclem and Tammi Terrell are real experts and they undoubtedly know more.)
The second is that phrases are seldom unique. To indulge in copious and colorful profanity is to swear like a sailor. Or curse like a sailor. Or like a trooper. Or like a fishwife. Or like a truck driver. Other languages have similar expressions. A phrase indicating a special effort to use everything up or to get to the end would also likely have several variants. And it does: The whole kit and caboodle; The whole shooting match; The whole shebang; The whole ball of wax; The whole enchilada. They appeared in roughly that order, starting in the late 19th century.
The third is that even slang gets recorded. People have always been fascinated by slang. The first English dictionary of slang appeared in 1699. Use of the vernacular in fiction and essays increased greatly in the 19th century in the UK, with an emphasis on Scottish words and phrases. Not everything got recorded, of course, and not everything has been saved. Even so, the fact that no evidence exists of a phrase for more than a century after it supposedly was in use is highly suggestive of a folk etymology.
You complain that we’re not your anecdotal hearsay seriously, and we’re not. But you aren’t taking the highly evolved and massive science of etymology seriously and that’s a much greater error. And though you allude to it, you aren’t putting enough stress on how similar your argument sounds to the dozens of other anecdotal suggestions for the phrase’s origin. A nice roundup of the silliness appear here. Note that that’s a UK site, so the accusations of unScots prejudice wouldn’t hold as much.
We are demanding proof because that’s the way the game is played. There have been many threads on this site alone, and hundreds across the internet and earlier in print publications, with thousands of comments and suggestions. Did you really think that you could walk in here with the same handful of nothing that has been offered a million times before and expect everyone to just acclaim at your insight? This is absolutely no different from the people who post that relativity is wrong in physics threads and infinity isn’t real in math threads. We have real experts here who are happy to explain how math and physics works to those who want to listen and to tear apart the ignorant blather of those who don’t. Etymology is a not a trivia pub game. You don’t get to just call out answers and insist that they’re right. You do the long, aching, often boring work and provide the hard facts and let them lead you where they will.