Unraveling "the whole nine yards"

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
21

Maybe it’s just me (and Patch), but my hunch is that “the whole six yards [of it]” actually does have something to do with telling a complete story or giving a detailed report. And, by implication, going all the way in delivering the story or report (so maybe we are of a similar mind, Irishman).

Compare these forms:

[1964] “'Give ‘em the whole nine yards’ is an item-by-item report on any project.”

[1921] “The Whole Six Yards of It,” used as the headline of an inning-by-inning report on a baseball game.

[1916] “Well, Mr. Editor we must take our hat off to you. In your last week’s editorial you sure did give them the whole six yards and it did suit us to a T.Y.”

[1912] “As we have been gone for a few days and failed to get all the news for this issue we will give you the whole six yards in our next.”

[1912] “But there is one thing sure, we dems would never have known that there was such crookedness in the Republican party if Ted and Taft had not got crossed at each other. Just wait boys until the fix gets to a fever heat and they will tell the whole six yards.”

For me, the 1964 and 1921 usages give the impression of a detailed listing of factors or datapoints. A 1962 sighting of “all nine yards of goodies” (features on a new car) has a similar feel: it conveys an itemization or, as Doug Wilson has pointed out, a listing such as you’d find on a car window sticker.

Note 1964’s “give 'em,” 1916’s “give them,” and 1912’s “give you.” And note 1912’s “will tell.” “Tell” strengthens “give” in the sense of sharing/delivering something orally or in writing. (And note that there’s no “go” or “went” here.) If you’ve been of the WWII ammo-belt theory camp, it’s easy to see “give 'em the whole nine yards” as suggesting the delivering of bullets. I think, though, that the original sense of “give” is more subtle, conveying sharing (information).

My gut tells me that “yards” is a way of suggesting a (metaphorical) length of information delivered orally or in writing. (We have plenty of examples from the period where folks used “yards” in just this way.) And “six” because “six yards” implies further length, thoroughness. Perhaps folks were using other numbers before we eventually arrived at nine. But I do think that these early uses suggest that the idiom may have started as a means of signalling that all the details of a story (and similar) were, are, and will be given.

22

There is a similar collection of silly folk etymologies that kept pouring in for years added to the column that is the first link inside the New York Times article, the phrase wild speculative corners.

On a side note, I’ve heard several other “whole” phrases that emphasize givin’ 'em everything.

The whole shebang
The whole enchilada
The whole ball of wax
The whole shooting match
The whole kit and caboodle

None of those have any real logic about wholeness, the way the folk etymologies persist in positing a physical analog - concrete, cloth, machine gun bullets - that they can put a number on. The wholes are obviously humorous means of emphasis, using exaggeration or hyperbole to indicate the vast lengths gone through on the road to completeness. In fact, the existence of all these other phrases is to me the best proof that its absurd to come up with a story that puts any physical object at nine yards’ core. As soon as you hear one, you know it has to be wrong.

23

I don’t see any comments and I don’t see anything to click on.

24

You probably have some sort of add block running. If I look at the NY times article with chrome and ad block on I don’t see the comments. With Internet explorer and no add block there are comments.

25

I think I asked about “the whole ball of wax” here on the SDMB several years ago, and found out that no one really knows where it came from.

26

Okay, you make a good argument.

When the page loads, comments aren’t visible at first. I scroll to the bottom of the page, past the footer, and then the comments automatically load. But they aren’t there until I scroll down as far as I can, and then some more.

I know, doesn’t make much sense. Below the “Get 50% Off The New York Times & Free All Digital Access” line, comments load.

27

That’s certainly true for any article in any mass-media publication (newspaper, TV, cable channel, wide-circulation magazine) website. You find out all too quickly why nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.

28

Comments on Slate.com work the same way. It’s a feature, not a bug. :rolleyes:

29

I suspect its ultimate origin will be the result of some long-forgotten Semitic grammar lesson, and it originally had to do with “all six (or nine) yodhs.”

30

That sentence would make sense to me if it ended in “… to a T.” What’s with the extra “Y.”? Did it mean something back then?

I didn’t see any comments at all. I deleted everything after .html in the URL (giving http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/27/books/the-whole-nine-yards-seeking-a-phrases-origin.html), and hit enter to reload, and the comments just appeared without me doing anything.

Now when I click on the link in the OP, I also get comments that weren’t originally ever there.

Yeah, that all makes sense…

31

Yes, we’ve been puzzling out “T.Y.” See, for example,

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind1211A&L=ADS-L&P=R4952

It is in the Dictionary of American Regional English, where it’s listed as “tee-whitie,” with variants, and defined as “To a T, precisely, perfectly.” But Joan Hall, chief editor of DARE, tells me that she doesn’t know how it evolved (i.e., how we moved from “to a T” to “to a T-Y-T” and variants).

I suppose we could speculate that it’s an abbreviation for “ten yards [total]” . . .

32

Defective math, isn’t it? If 1912 is 6 and 1956 is 9, we must note that we have not yet reached 12 (if we ever will). So we cannot accurately calculate the interval between increments, and can only speculate as to whether the progression is arithmetic or geometric.

33

May as well. There are 14 kinds of guesses in abbreviation-featured phrase discovery.

34

Nice.

35

Congrats to our very own Doper word-origin experts!

36

It appears to at least be non-linear, with a negative second differential (decelerating): it took 48 years to get to The Whole Ten Yards. fwiw

37

Yeah, our resident etymologists have really gone the whole ten yards and 3.5861 inches on this one.

38

Hooray for ** Tammi Terrell** and samclem!

39

The page from the Spartanburg Herald-Journal shown in the Times article appears to be a broadsheet page with 8 columns. The size of a broadsheet page isn’t exactly standardized, and has shrunk over the decades, but http://www.papersizes.org/newspaper-sizes.htm mentions 29.5 inches as a common height. Assuming 1.25 inch top-and-bottom margins (admittedly, an estimate), that gives a 27-inch column height.

Eight columns times 27 inches equals 216 inches. So a newspaper story that fills up a whole broadsheet page takes up the whole six yards.

Just an observation. It could indicate the origin of the phrase; but it could just as easily mean that the expression “the whole nine yards” was already in use, and the sports columnist jokingly changed it to “six” to refer to the space allotted him.

40

Thanks for that, Cartoonacy. (And thanks too to others for their kind comments.)

Yes, we’ve wondered whether “the whole X yards” could be a reference to newsprint or paper used in printing news. It’s possible, of course. Don’t forget, though, the 1912 and 1916 usages in a smalltown Kentucky newspaper. If Spartansburg’s sports editor had in mind “the whole nine yards” and changed the number to “six” in jest, someone in Rockcastle County, Kentucky had done the same three times within the previous decade. (Of course, I don’t know whether that strengthens or weakens your case.)

It’s tough to know, I think, whether “the whole six yards” was a true precursor or whether it co-existed with “the whole nine yards” (examples of which from 100 years ago we haven’t yet found) or whether people were using various versions of “the whole X yards” at the time and that these usages lie undiscovered. For whatever reason (phrase inflation?), though, “the whole nine yards” and related variants, “the full nine yards” and “all nine yards,” seem to have been the forms to emerge from the muck and make it into the 21st century.