That’s the article #3 in** tammi terrell’s** post above showing how this search has progressed over the last 20 years.
Oh, pooh. Sorry about that.
Maybe we should be contacting NASA to see how they picked it up?
That would have been logical until the two cites before #3. If you could tie the writers of #1/#2 to NASA or the USAF, then we might be getting somewhere.
Even if we could contact NASA and ask them about the use of “the whole nine yards” in the newspaper article, what could they tell us? They would say, “Huh, that was 46 years ago. Hardly anyone who worked here then is still around. Besides, that was just what some newspaper reporter wrote. How do you know it was correct even then?”
We could try to contact Stephen Trumbell, the reporter who wrote that newspaper article back then and see what he has to say about it. I’ve just done an Internet search and found nothing useful. If somebody else wants to try, go ahead.
Any news???
I must know the answer! :eek:
No reply so far. I gave him both my address and my E-mail address in the letter I sent him.
I’ve been doing some research, here is what I’ve found (forgive me if some of this is off-topic, I want to record everything I found interesting) :
First, I found a small problem with the Google ngram data files and the book search - there are a couple of entries in the 3-gram files for “whole nine yards” that date back to 1899 and sometime in the 1700s that can’t be found in the book search. 
I doubt these were idiomatic uses though, since there was such a big gap between these and the next usage.
Another thing I found is that the 9-yard length does seem to be the default length for kilts - including a reference in a 1954 Saturday Evening Post to the nine yard length, and a reference to the Burmese kilt or putsoe. Still, I agree with others that this isn’t the source, not only because of the other reasons stated above but because this appears to be the standard length for kilt fabric, and the idiom implies at least a touch of excess.
Pursuing the NASA connection didn’t get me very far either, although I did get this quote from Scott Crossfield, one of the original test pilots of trans-sonic and supersonic planes, about testing the X-15:
That was from the book “Space Shuttle” by Melvyn Smith, published in 1989; I can’t tell when the actual quote was made, but it couldn’t have been made earlier than 1960, which is when he made his last flight in the X-15. (And yes, could have been anytime after that)
That brought me back to the Air Force. I talked to my brother(the airplane and WWII nut) on Sunday and he mentioned a specific plane that he has a book on that he thought would fit the description. Not wanting to wait on him, I went back to google. One of the books I found on Google books was titled “The whole nine yards: the story of an Anzac P-40”. While (again) this book was published much later than our first reference, I decided to look up what I could on the P-40
Wiki on the P-40
The P-40 was equipped with 6 M2 Browning machine guns that took 150-200 .50 inch rounds a piece. This equates to each gun taking up to one hundred inches of ammunition. That’s eight inches short of three yards. If the belts have ~ 1 mm between rounds, it’s right at 3 yards per gun, 9 yards per side and 18 yards total per aircraft.
And “whole nine yards” does scan better than “whole eighteen yards” 
What may be more relevant is that the P-40 seems to have been quite a popular choice for general use combat flying. If you visualize a WWII airplane, it’s quite likely a P-40. You know the planes with the shark teeth painted on them? Those are P-40s. P-40s were the planes used by a group of American volunteers helping the Chinese fight Japan before Pearl Harbor - the group was called the “Flying Tigers” and became the subject of a John Wayne movie by the same name. It’s also the group that a 70s TV show called “Black Sheep Squadron” was based on.
At this point, my conjecture is that the either one of the newsreels or the John Wayne movie used the phrase “the whole nine yards” and it made its way into the popular idiom that way. I watched one of the newsreels on youtube (where you can see one of the ammo belts being loaded) but I’m not willing to watch a John Wayne movie to see if I’m right.
About 10 years ago in this thread, **Czarcasm **said:
I couldn’t find any mention of the outcome but if the phrase was in there we probably would have heard about it in some of the many discussions on the subject since then. The film was made in 1942 and the next known sighting would still be almost 20 years later making this theory as unlikely as any other version of the WWII ammo belt theory.
“Black Sheep Squadron” was about a US Marine Corps squadron (VMF-214) that flew F-4U Corsairs. The squadron commander, Major Gregory “Pappy” Boyington, had flown with the Flying Tigers, but the show itself was about his later career in the USMC, commanding that squadron.
[/hijack]
And the right name of the show was Baa Baa Black Sheep, although Black Sheep Squadron was used in later syndication.
Ouch. And I made that mistake after I read this:
Here’s a picture of “belted” 50 caliber ammunition. If those copper-clad bullets are 0.5" in diameter, it looks as if each round occupies something close to an inch. So 150 would be a touch over 4 yards.
I just got an E-mail in reply to the letter I sent to Wegner on January 11th. The E-mail is from his daughter Julie Wegner Arnold, who is a professor of French at Alma College (where Wegner taught). In my E-mail, I included the list from post 23 of all nine uses of the phrase between 1962 and 1966. I give the entire E-mail below, but notice the following things: The E-mail says something about my previously having written him and E-mailed him, but it wasn’t me that did that. I suspect that the people at Alma College are remembering some letter and E-mail sent to him by somebody else (probably somebody in the American Dialect Society mailing list) and assuming that I also wrote that letter and E-mail.
Wegner thinks that the phrase has something to do with shipyards in World War II. Interestingly, at some point somebody found a reference in congressional debates during World War II to “the whole nine yards” in reference to nine shipyards. The assumption up to now has been that this was simply an accidental use of the phrase to talk about all nine shipyards under discussion in that debate. It’s possible that that was just accidental and it’s possible that somehow the term spread and was heard by Wegner. It’s possible that Wegner is inserting a story he heard much later into his memories (as often happens among almost everybody).
samclem and Tammi Terrell, you can go ahead and notify the American Dialect Society people about this E-mail. I will be E-mailing Arnold and telling her that I’ve never seen the magazine the story appeared in nor even the whole story. Here’s the E-mail I received:
Dear Mr. Wagner,
My colleagues in the English department at Alma College recently brought to my attention the second letter you wrote to my father in their care and also mentioned that you have contacted them by e-mail in hopes of reaching him.
Some months ago I took your original letter to my father. I apologize that he never responded to you. He will soon turn 82, has chronic memory problems, and he suffers from a lack of motivation. Yesterday I shared your second letter with him, and we went on line to the link you provided and read the quote from “Man on the Thresh-Hold” in which the expression “the whole nine yards” appears. My father wrote and published numerous short stories, and since this one was written nearly 50 years ago, at this point he does not specifically recall writing it. Nonetheless he laughed enthusiastically as I read the quote from the story and said that it sounds indeed like something he wrote. My mother and I also agree that this passage sounds just like him and is typical of his style and subject matter (friction or lack of communication between man and wife; enumeration of domestic realities or responsibilities; mention of a left-handed college professor, which he is and was). Too, my mother bought Fuller brushes! However, to be absolutely sure that he is the author, it will be best to have him read the story in its entirety so that he can better recognize it. To jump start my search, can you tell me the library in which you found the fall, 1962 issue of Michigan Voices? He has never been very good about cataloguing his own work or keeping copies easily identifiable in his own library.
In the meantime, my father is quite lucid about what believes to be the origin of “the whole nine yards.” He did not hesitate to say that he thought it derived from a WWII program to arm the nation and specifically build the navy. He thought it referred to ship building yards on the east coast and always thought there were nine of them, though he couldn’t verify that for sure. However, he says that he personally has always used to term “to express extravagance, or an all-out effort.”
I hope this is somewhat helpful and look forward to hearing from you.
Julie Wegner Arnold
Professor of French
Alma College
Just one question: how many yards have we gone so far to answer this question?
Thanks for your efforts on this front, Wendell Wagner! I hope you’ll be able to follow up with the younger Prof. Wegner (or, rather, Wegner Arnold) soon.
samclem or I can probably help you with getting a copy of the full short story, if that helps. (Another member of the ADS-L found the complete work.) But I don’t think the authorship is in question – I’m sure you’ve found the creator of “Man on the Thresh-Hold.”
I wonder if I could ask a few further questions, though. (I’m sure other readers here will pipe up, too.)
In your letter, did you happen to ask the elder Prof. Wegner how he may have first encountered the expression? I recognize his memory may be failing, so it may be difficult for him to know exactly how he became acquainted with the phrase, but it would be helpful to see what he can recall. (It might be helpful to ask his wife the same question. Presumably she was familiar with the expression, at least by the time her husband wrote the story.)
Also, were you able to ask a bit about his background? You probably should let him volunteer this information and avoid fishing for specifics (like asking him whether he ever served in the military or whether he had a side interest in aviation), but it would be interesting to see what he reveals.
I just got a second E-mail from Julie Wegner Arnold. As you remember from the first E-mail, the Wegner family wasn’t certain that he was the author of the story. Wegner said that he wrote a number of stories back then and couldn’t be certain that he wrote that one. Arnold said that the story sounded like something that her father wrote. As you can see in the E-mail below, they are now certain that it was his story. Wegner searched through some folders with his stories and found that one.
Tammi Terrell, I would rather not be the one to bother the Wegner family with too many E-mails. Is it possible for someone in the American Dialect Society Listserv to take over the communication with Arnold at this point? I would give her E-mail address to the person who will do that. Alternately, if you want me to be the one who contacts her, I would like the people at the American Dialect Society to compose the E-mail so we can ask the necessary questions in as few E-mails as possible.
Here is the E-mail I just got from Julie Wegner Arnold:
Hello again, Mr. Wagner,
Since I sent you the e-mail yesterday, my father located a folder in which he had stored several slender issues of Michigan Voices, all of which contain submissions by him. This includes the Fall, 1962 issue containing “Man on the Thresh-hold.” There is no doubt that he wrote the story.
I hope my e-mails are helpful to you. Good luck with your on-going research.
Julie Wegner Arnold
Here is the text of the letter I sent to Robert E. Wegner (via his English Department address):
Dear Mr. Wegner,
Are you the Robert E. Wegner who wrote the story “Man on the Thresh-Hold” in the Fall 1962 issue of Michigan’s Voices? If so, you could be part of the solution of one of the major problems in the etymology of American English. The origin of the phrase “the whole nine yards” has been mystifying etymologists for decades. The phrase was never attested before the 1960’s, but it’s now very common. There are only nine uses of the phrase in print between 1962 and 1966:
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Fall, 1962, “the whole nine yards” and “the whole damn nine yards” in a short story appearing in a Michigan literary magazine, Where Did We Get "The Whole Nine Yards"? : Word Routes : Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus
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December, 1962, “all nine yards of” in a letter to Car Life, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/langu...es/005107.html
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April, 1964, “the whole nine yards” in a syndicated newspaper article about NASA slang, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/langu...es/004623.html
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April, 1965, “the whole nine yards” in a newspaper article describing the completeness of a military training exercise, http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi…=R6101&m=73644
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December, 1965, “the whole nine yards” used to describe well-outfitted military uniforms, in a newspaper article, http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi…=ADS-L&P=R2892
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June, 1966, “the whole nine yards” in a newspaper article describing a collection of Indiana folklore, http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi...L=ads-l&P=6810
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September, 1966, “the nine yards of” at a symposium of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots, http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi...L=ads-l&P=5152
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September, 1966, multiple instances of “the whole nine yards” in Wings of the Tiger: A Novel, http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi...&F=&S=&P=15082
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1966 (published early 1967), multiple instances of “the whole nine yards” (and variants) in Doom Pussy, e.g., http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi...L=ads-l&P=3120 and http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php...ine_yards_the/ (Is there a concise listing elsewhere of all examples to be found in Doom Pussy?)
The origin of “the whole nine yards” is discussed frequently on the American Dialect Society Listserv, an E-mail-distributed discussion group about American English dialects (which I don’t read), and on the Straight Dope Message Board, an online message board about interesting difficult questions of all sorts (which I do regularly read). It just occurred to me to try to search online for anyone with the name Robert E. Wegner. Since you were teaching English at a college in Michigan in 1962, it struck me that you were the most likely person to have written this story.
If you are indeed the person who wrote this story, can you remember anything about using the phrase “the whole nine yards”? Was it something you commonly heard? Did you hear it from some particular other person? Is there anything else you can say about the phrase?
Sincerely,
Wendell Wagner, Jr.
You didn’t think that they sewed the whole length of the rope onto the bottom corrner of the sail did you? You have to bend the sails: in particular, you have to bend the sheet(s) onto the clew(s).
That is, you have to tie the sails to your masts, and attach control lines to the loose corners of your sails.
Interesting that yet another meaning of “yard” has come up here in this letter from Ms. Arnold and Mr. Wegner. Out of all the proposed origins of the phrase that have come up before, have any referred to “ship yards”? It’s a new one on me, anyway, but I have to admit that I don’t follow the topic as closely as some here do.
Yes, there was a reference to a Navy report to Congress or some such that came up from IIRC WWII, where they were talking about getting the naval ship yards into production, and there being 9 naval shipyards. There was a passing reference to getting “all nine yards” working. IIRC.
So far it has been discounted because of timing (WWII, with no other related usage anywhere), and the nature of the quote. It’s entirely possible that Wegner heard this explanation somewhere and is now repeating it. Part of the reason for wanting follow up questions.
The phrase was used by Admiral Emory Land in April 1942 during testimony for a senate investigation of the national defense program. It’s been cited before but I always took this to be a purely coincidental use of the phrase. It seems unlikely that senate sub-committee testimony would even make it’s way into the popular vernacular. If it did it is still a mystery why it didn’t appear in print anywhere for 20 more years.
There’s another known early use of the term from as far back as 1855 - a short story called The Judge’s Big Shirt, which is also clearly coincidental.