So, now that there’s a “whole six yards” antecedent, are we going to be subjected to all the old stand-bys? It takes exactly six yards of cloth to make a Scottish kilt, ammunition belts from the Franco-Prussian War were exactly six yards long, etc etc ?
… happy new year.
My devil strip is six yards!
At what point(s) in history did the US Navy have six shipyards?
Only time I’ve ever wanted to be able to “Like” a post.
According to The Scottish Trading Company, the traditional breacan feile, or Great Kilt, is 4 and a half to six yards of wool tartan. It is nothing else, just a rectangular piece of fabric, that the wearer folds, pleats and belts. Not, however, 9 yards in length.
underwear is optional
I know that, For You, I was being sarcastic. The fabric-for-kilt thing was one of the more ludicrous “explanations” for “whole nine yards.”
I came in here expecting yet another of the countless threads saying how “everyone” knows that the whole nine yards is the length of a belt of ammo, fabric for a kilt/shroud/sari, etc, etc. :smack:
I’m so happy to be wrong!
Nice detective work Tammi and Sam!
Apparently so did everyone else. Did you notice that about 20 of the posters have been around for 10 years or more? It’s like an old-timers game.
I might have missed it, but did it give the author of the articles anywhere? If they were done by the same person it might just have been their own colorful speech. If they were different maybe we should search some more Kentuckian papers.
:dubious: This old-timer recognized Tammi Terrell. I knew there’d be an update, not some already-discredited theory.
For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure one unnamed writer who reported news out of the small town of Livingston (Kentucky) was the user of “the whole six yards” in that Kentucky newspaper in the 1910s. A so-far unidentified sports writer for the Spartanburg, South Carolina newspaper was responsible for “the whole six yards of it” in 1921. These writers were not the same person.
I don’t think it’s worrisome that the four earliest appearances of “the whole six yards” were penned by only two different people in two different newspapers. Consider that the only two so-far documented sightings of “the whole nine yards” from the 1950s were made by the same person, in the same publication. (This gentlemen, now in his early 80s, told me that “the whole nine yards” was something he grew up with in central Kentucky.) The third earliest occurrence of “the whole nine yards” (March, 1962) was the product of a different writer, but for the same Kentucky hunting and fishing magazine.
Something that’s important, I think, about many of these early sightings is that these phrases, none of which are set off by quotation marks, are thrown in nonchalantly, without the author’s (or editor’s) apparently feeling the need to explain to readers what the heck the expression means. (Note that the same Kentucky newspaperman who casually used “the whole six yards” in the 1910s just as casually used “suit to a T.Y.,” which is completely foreign to us modern readers, but was apparently pretty well known at the time.) Of the six earliest appearances of “the whole nine yards” (including “all nine yards”) we’ve spotted so far (1957 through 1962), only one appears with any sort of notation about the expression’s use: Robert Wegner’s 1962 short story mentions “the whole nine yards, as a brush salesman who came by the house was fond of saying.” It’s only Wegner who felt it important to elaborate on the expression, however briefly.
To me, that these early occurrences of “the whole yards” appeared without further explanation indicates that “the whole six yards” was known in at least in one part of Kentucky in the 1910s and at least shortly thereafter in western South Carolina. Further, by 1956 and 1957, “the whole nine yards” was likely familiar to some readers in Kentucky (and perhaps elsewhere). For those the expression may not have been familiar, the idiom was, from the viewpoint of the author (or editor/publisher), probably something readers ought to be able to figure out from context.
Bloody good work.
Now can we finally locate the origin of the cheeseburger?
Buried in the mist. Probably multiple people adapted it in the 1920s.
But, but, but, it was Pasadena!
No wait, Akron!
No, New York…
Sorry to bump an oldish thread, but for those still interested in this word puzzle …
That’s about the only thing I seem to have gotten right in this, to acknowledge that “the whole six yards” and “the whole nine yards” may have co-existed a hundred years ago. Because we now have usages in south central Indiana of “the full nine yards” and “the whole nine yards” dating back a hundred years.
Interesting, and certainly lays waste to the WWII fighter plane theory…
Curious that all these mentions are in the same obscure, defunct publication.
Or that it originated in WWI with the Vickers machine gun.
And buh-bye to the concrete truck theory.
Yes, and I think there was just one (anonymous) user of the expression (likely the editor/publisher) at this smalltown newspaper. Much like there was just one user of “the whole six yards” in that Kentucky newspaper at roughly the same time. (We do have a user of “the whole six yards” in South Carolina in 1921, but still.)
Who knows, then, how common these expressions were in those communities a hundred years ago, but there was obviously some expectation that readers in south central Indiana and in the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains would be familiar with the idiom since nobody bothered giving further explanation.
By the way, I’ve no doubt we’ll find other instances of the idiom in other publications of the period in the coming months. These smalltown newspapers aren’t often digitized and added to various electronic news databases, but – with the enormous interest in geneaological research – it’s now worth it to sites that make such news databases available to add things like The Mitchell Commercial. So, although the appearance of “the full/whole nine yards” in just one newspaper of the period may look like a fluke, I think it’s just a signal that we’re getting close to unearthing many more instances as these databases enlarge.
Since I first heard the phrase in Coast Guard recruit training, I figured it was a reference to a 3 masted ship with 3 yardarms on each mast. The “whole nine yards” would mean all yardarms would have sails deployed, therefore you’d be getting maximum speed. I think I suggested this once somewhere online and got shot down by the .50 cal ammo belts for P-51s. [pun intended :p]