Allen Walker Read, whose research provided The Straight Dope with the answers to Where is Podunk? and What does “OK” stand for? , sadly died earlier this week at age 96, according to a notice in Deaths Elsewhere . In remembrance, I suggest we recite the etymologies for “bought the farm”, “six feet under”, and “kicked the bucket”.
So, barring any unpublished notes in Read’s papers, this means we are now on our own in the on-going quest for the answer to What’s the origin of “the whole nine yards”?
samclem
October 20, 2002, 10:18pm
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Only last night I was musing on the origins of “The Whole Nine Yards.” I had just read a column by Michael Quinion which gave me a new tact on the subject.
Allen. Godspeed.
The Economist is carrying Mr. Read’s obituary in this week’s issue. It’s available online at http://www.economist.com/people/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1403400 .
[Allen Walker Read] sought words that he said had “a racy, human quality”, and there were none racier than the graffiti collected by Mr Read during a trip of several months through the western United States and Canada in the summer of 1928. He put together the results of his trip in a book entitled, “Lexical Evidence from Epigraphy in Western North America: a Glossarial Study of the Low Element in the English Vocabulary”. Notwithstanding the academic title, the book contained material unacceptable for publication at the time in America. One of the milder entries, found by Mr Read on a monument, reads: “When you want to shit in ease/Place your elbows on your knees/Put your hands against your chin/Let a fart and then begin”. Mr Read had the book printed in Paris in 1935, perhaps encouraged that James Joyce had first published “Ulysses” there in the 1920s. Even so, only 75 copies of “Lexical Evidence” were printed and issued privately to “students of linguistics, folklore, abnormal psychology and allied branches of social sciences”. The book was published in the United States in 1977 as “Classic American Graffiti”.