Respectfully submitted for you perusal: Article from 2022. Or you could just look up the wiki.
Anyway. . . not there’s a conclusion, but the point they raise is that it doesn’t have to mean anything specific, other examples being “whole ball of wax,” “whole enchilada,” “whole shebang.” I heard one person use the phrase “whole shootin’ match” referring to a car that pretty much all the appointments available, the point being that once you say “the whole. . .” it pretty doesn’t matter what comes after it.
What’s a little noteworthy about this article is that it mentions SDMB’s on samclem and the seldom posting Bonnie Taylor-Blake, although that’s not the name she used on this page. She didn’t post much on this site, but was much more active on the old snopes board.
I find the conclusion-but-not-really appealing and satisfying.
But then, I’m comfortable with unanswerable ambiguities. I genuinely like it when something ends without ending, and puts the onus back on the thinker to consider the meaning and import of the aborted climax. I acknowledge I’m weird that way.
I agree, but “the whole 9 yards” has always annoyed me because, as a passionate football fan, I’m used to my team needing “the whole 10 yards” to get a first down.
So really, judging by Cecil’s article, no one will ever know for sure. The theories that seemed to hold promise all, upon a closer look, seemed to have serious flaws.
I apologize that I haven’t read the links yet, but wanted to make a quick comment.
The Whole Nine Yards and all these other similar colloquialisms have a fundamentally different meaning.
“The Whole Nine Yards” means you are going above and beyond in scope. It means you’re doing all of it that can be done, you’re not just doing what’s required.
“The Whole Ball of Wax” and “The Whole Shootin’ Match”, as well as the others, essentially mean that failing at one critical point will cause the whole project to be a failure. Essentially those items are table stakes for an objective, while you can maybe make mistakes on other items and still get a successful or acceptable result, this specific item is all or nothing.
Now, until I read the links I won’t say whether this undermines the core point or not, but it seems like OP is creating a false equivalence. All those similar phrases mean exactly the same thing and people swap out the words for comedic effect or maybe with regional flavors. These aren’t really different examples, they are one example, and it means something different than the famous one.
Sorry, never heard the Whole Nine Yards means anything but all of it. Nothing about going above and beyond. Can you provide an example of your interpretation?
I’ve read some of the links, and the earliest reference given is worthless: they’ve got an isolated reference for “The whole six yards” where it means the whole six yards, which is like finding an isolated reference for “That’s all folks” that predates Looney Tunes.
There’s quite a few sayings like this one, false etymologies, where the obvious and most reasonable explanation for the saying is actually incorrect. Note I am no more convinced by the other “explanations” in both articles. Yes this one bugs me, in the same exact way that some mondegreens bug me (where I am convinced my “mondegreen” is the correct lyric or at least a better one), since in most cases no definitive and authoritative version of the lyric actually exists anywhere. [and the artist in question if ever asked simply shrugs his or her shoulders]
[I ran across this again last week in the lyrics thread in TG, where some record label hack thought ELO’s “I Can’t Get It Out Of My Head” says “Walking on a wave’s chicane” instead of “Walking on a wave she came”, when (A) a term typically used in auto racing simply doesn’t fit there, at all, (B) Jeff Lynne unlike some other lyricists like Michael Stipe never really indulged in lyrical obscurantism of that sort, and (C) it doesn’t rhyme with the next line in any event “Staring as she called my name”.]
The first time I ran across the phrase was in the Silver John story Nine Yards of Other Cloth, where it was asserted to be the amount of cloth used in a burial shroud.
A saying related to the meaning of ‘The whole…’ but not using ‘The whole’ is the saying ‘lock, stock and barrel’. Both indicate the state of completeness in effort, covering everything.
I used to relate the saying to a football situation where it was 3rd and 9, and did wonder if that was a saying from an announcer from an actual game.
I first heard the expression in a conversation in a western movie, where two cowboys or soldiers (I forgot) sitting around a campfire muse about the worst indian tortures they have heard of, and one mentions the slicing open of the victim’s belly, when the end of the gut is taken out and held firmly in place while the victim is forced to run the whole length of the gut, that is, the whole nine yards of the small intestine, until he finally collapses. Dead by self-evisceration.
I don’t remember which movie it was, but I remember that as a little boy I thought that nobody would make me run those nine yards if I was going to die anyway. No idea whether this is the right explanation, but the small intestine is often refered to as being nine yards long. And the use of “the whole” makes sense in such a case.
We held a yard sale a while back. Lots of free beer left everyone three sheets to the wind, but not a one got sold, so we were left with the whole nine yards that we had to figure out where to store (and they are full-size yards).
The problem with trying to find the actual origin of the phrase is that far too many people translate that as “Where did you first hear the phrase ‘The Whole Nine yards’” and report accordingly, ignoring all posts that give earlier dates. The glurge-to-fact ratio on this one is extremely high.