I’ve tried to find the significance in the number nine in such sayings as ‘The Whole Nine Yards’ and ‘Dressed to the Nines’ or ‘A Stitch in Time Saves Nine’. Internet research in inconclusive. The mystical nine Muses is mentioned. Nine yards of cloth to make a shroud, or a wedding dress, or a suit of clothes and the like is mentioned. In the end it has been concluded that ‘we just don’t know but sources suspect that the number nine was significant in the seventeenth century’.
I turn in hope to the SDMB to determine if there is a more authoritative respones to my question, ‘What is the significance of the number nine in old sayings’?
In my humble and utterly-devoid-of-facts opinion, ‘nine’ is used simply by virtue of it being the largest single-digit whole number. It makes for a neat and tidy stopping point and is the biggest of its set.
Except “the whole nine yards” is first documented from the late 1950’s or early 1960’s, so it would appear to have nothing to do with the seventeenth century.
There are several numbers that seem to have had magical properties going back a long time, including 3, 7, 9 and 13.
What do they have in common:
(1) They are all odd
(2) They are all prime (except for 9, which is the square of the first odd prime).
Two are connected with the calendar: there are 7 days in a week (which in turn is about a quarter of a month), and there are about 13 lunar months in a year. 7 times 13 is 91, the number of days in a quarter of a year.
The other two are connected with each other, since 9 is 3 squared.
AFAIK, the saying is actually ‘A Switch in Time Saves Nine,’ and is a reference to the nine Justices of the Supreme Court. During the 1930s, FDR experienced opposition from the Court in regard to his New Deal legislation. Re-election by landslide and support in Congress meant a blank check, and FDR introduced his court-packing plan. Essentially, the plan was to keep adding more Justices to the Court until he got what he wanted.
Things never came to a head because one of the Justices suddenly changed his mind on the legislation, and the New Deal proceeded. Thus, the switch saved the nine, and they remain only nine today.
I think there may have been a folk or early blues song that used the line as a lyric, but I might just be imagining that.
I might be getting whooshed, here, but Grossbottom, are you claiming that the sewing meaning of the phrase (which happens to be the one consistent with how the phrase is actually used) is entirely coincidental? If a tear starts forming in a piece of cloth, you might be able to fix it with only a single stitch, if you catch it early. But if you ignore the tear, it’ll grow, until you might eventually need a great many stitches to repair it. This meaning is pretty obvious, leaving unanswered only the question of “why nine specifically?”.
Robert Graves in The White Goddess (?) IIR said the nine muses appeared to be an outgrowth of three muses with three variations (possibly the maiden/wife/crone triad seen among goddesses).
Of course the muses might have been influenced similarly to the modern Olympics, ie if you have a muse each for Poetry and Sculpture, you need one for Painting, for Music, for Dance, and so forth.
And I’ve heard ‘nine (cubic) yards’ is the capacity of a cement truck. “I gave him the whole nine yards”…Dopers with actual knowledge of cement trucks may be of assistance here.