Whole (Full) Nine Yards ?

[Telemark]

@Pugspapa

Lots of great answers, but unless I missed it, all wrong. The actual origin of the phrase " whole nine yards" is actually related to fabric and tailoring, but very specific. It is the traditional amount of material used in creating the Pope’s ceremonial vestment. While I am not certain if this still remains the standard, it was indeed the tradition, and the origin of the phrase.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any documentation to support this theory, and it appears to be a corruption of the more popular (but equally unsupported) theory about making a full Scottish kilt.

[Tammi_Terrell]

@CurtC

The joke as told here does seem to depend on its being a pre-existing phrase, and an extremely common one if the joke was to be funny to large numbers of people. If that’s so, then where are references before the joke? That’s the problem.

For what it’s worth, Gershon Legman describes something similar to the joke Stratton recalls hearing in flight school in the mid-50s. Legman notes that he heard the anecdote in D.C. in 1951 and prefaces his telling with the observation that it falls in a category of “jokes in which the man displays to the woman, not the fact of erection but simply his penis, again under some subterfuge or pretense of error.”

A Highlander plans to give his girl a yard of tartan plaid for Christmas, and to make sure she likes the pattern has a kilt made of it which he wears the next time he visits her. “How do you like it?” he asks, twirling around in front of her. “It looks all right to me,” she says rather surprised. “Fine,” he answers, “because you’re going to get thirty-six inches of it for Christmas.” (p. 290, Rationale of the Dirty Joke, 1968)

Now, it does bear some resemblance to Stratton’s recollection of a version told in 1955, even in that the fabric items were to be gifts. Legman, however, doesn’t mention a version involving nine yards or any length longer than one yard. (In fact, to my ears “thirty-six inches” seems to work better than “nine yards” or even “one yard.”)

Could Stratton’s “whole nine yards” version (ca. 1955) have been adapted from Legman’s 1951 version (in the mid-1950s or since) or did it evolve on its own and coexist with Legman’s variant? Tough to say, but – if “the whole nine yards” has anything to do with a dirty joke – I don’t think it’s too difficult to envision a scenario in which a teller has fashioned a pre-existing anecdote to fit what may have been a flight-school shibboleth.

In the end, for many of the reasons already mentioned by CurtC and others, I doubt that Andy McTavish’s impressive yardage (knit or otherwise) had anything to do with the origin of the expression.

[Tammi_Terrell]

By the way, in case it helps, here’s what we know so far about earliest appearances of “the whole nine yards” and variants. (Items 6 amd 7 are obviously more or less contemporaneous with Items 4 and 5.)

1. 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

2. December, 1962, “all nine yards of” in a letter to Car Life, Language Log: Great moments in antedating, part 2: all nine yards of goodies

3. April, 1964, “the whole nine yards” in a syndicated newspaper article about NASA slang, Language Log: Great moments in antedating

4. June, 1966, “the whole nine yards” in a newspaper article describing a collection of Indiana folklore, http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0706D&L=ads-l&P=6810

5. September, 1966, “the nine yards of” at a symposium of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots, http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0706D&L=ads-l&P=5152

6. September, 1966, multiple instances of “the whole nine yards” in Wings of the Tiger: A Novel, http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0711a&L=ads-l&D=1&F=&S=&P=15082

7. 1966 (published early 1967), multiple instances of “the whole nine yards” (and variants) in Doom Pussy, e.g., http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0410e&L=ads-l&P=3120 and http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/site/comments/whole_nine_yards_the/ (Is there a concise listing elsewhere of all examples to be found in Doom Pussy?)