As seen in the idioms “butter up” or “grease one’s palm.”
Good find. That prompted me to look earlier and I found something.
Back on November 20, 1903, a front page article in the [Covington] Kentucky Post about another Jim O’Dowd party also mentioned the “whole schmear”.
Everyone was there, from the Schnapps Band down. Und vat getrinken there vas! The whole schmear was feeling “sehr gut.”
No question that schmear was taken from the German rather than the Yiddish. Schmear kase was an Amish term for a kind of cream cheese, used both as a spread and a base for cheesecake.
The phrase “whole schmear” or “whole darn schmear” also pops up in the Norfolk [NE] Press on Dec. 24, 1909, The Kansas City Post on July 12, 1911 and October 26, 1916, and the [Mandan, ND] Morning Pioneer on April 21, 1921. Interesting that all are midwestern papers, since “schmear kase” was used across the country.
Ah, cool!
The first appearance of the “schmear” that I could find given a cursory look was in 1842 in the context of “schmear case/kase.” Surely many older, though.
Outside of that I found a reference to “schmear people,” which also seems to be “spread” related.
Creamery men are after [US Rep. from Kansas] Chester I. Long’s scalp. He made them promises two years ago that he would fight the oleomargarine people, and got about 8000 votes of patrons in this district on the strength of these promises. But when the oleo bill was up in Congress, instead of opposing the packing house schmear people, he favored them, not only in his vote, but in his speeches.
–Barton County Democrat, August 31, 1900
I decided to actually read “The Doom Pussy” in which the phase was once thought to have been first printed.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with belts of ammo.
The man who used it was a navigator in a B57 bomber. He was talking about getting out of a drunk marriage, not firing guns.
(the B57 used 33 foot long belts of 20mm ammo, but the “Doom Pussies” flew very dangerous Nighttime recon missions over North Viet Nam, and in any case, the guns were designed to be used for strafing, which the “Doom Pussies” didnt do. The name came from their special badge which had a big yellow cat with one eyepatch, and how dangerous their missions were).
The quote (regarding the Majors work to get out of the marriage)- “Slipping out of the knot was expensive but Smash was eventually able to entangle what he called ‘the whole nice yards’”. So, related to legal issues, not machine gun ammo.
There ya go. So that theory is laid to rest.
If that’s not a typo, I’m more confused than I was before reading this.
It is. 
The yards in Nice happen to be larger than the yards in America. That’s why the whole Nice yards became an expression.
Getting their newsprint in 27ft sheets – same as the wallpaper.
I’ll show myself out..
That establishes that he used the phrase in a certain context, but he may have been using a phrase that was for him already idiomatic
The phrase was idiomatic, and had been around for a century at that point.
Before the latest round of research that found those many old usages, Doom Pussy was one of the earliest known written examples of the phrase. Many people obviously misread the book and proclaimed that it proved that nine yards meant ammo belts. That supposed origin was everywhere in older discussions. Go back to Cecil’s 1987 column.
The whole nine yards (again)
Dear Cecil:
No opinions, no made up stories about wedding veils, coal, suits, or brass tacks. Based on discussions with my grandfathers, both World War II veterans, and confirmed by several military sources, here is the definitive answer for where “the whole nine yards” came from. The whole nine yards refers to the length of one ammunition belt from a belly-gunner’s machine gun. When a target was overly resilient and the gunner was forced to expend all his ammunition to bring it down, it was said to have taken the “whole nine yards.” Also, when loading up for a mission that was going to be particularly dangerous, gunners would refer to bringing the “whole nine yards,” as they would need quite a bit of ammunition to complete the mission safely.
— Ian McDonald, New York
Cecil replies:
You’re not dragging me into this one again. To quote Evan Morris, the Word Detective (www.word-detective.com): “‘The whole nine yards’ first cropped up in print in the mid-1960s … Even if machine gun belts really were 27 feet long in WWII, why has the phrase ‘the whole nine yards’ not been found in a single published account of that very well-documented war?”
Showing that Doom Pussy never used it in that fashion lays that theory to rest with a bevy of bullets to where the brain should be but wasn’t, as @DrDeth said. A good find.
To give a shout-out to our @Tammi_Terrell, who is Bonnie Taylor-Blake IRL, here’s the ur-article documenting her pioneering research that blew the whole case open, as they say on the teevee.
The breakthrough in the search for its origins came in 2012 when Bonnie Taylor-Blake, a neuroscience researcher in North Carolina, found an example in the June 1956 issue of a wildlife magazine called Kentucky Happy Hunting Ground. Shortly after, she unearthed a headline in the Spartanburg Herald-Journal in South Carolina dating from 7 May 1921: “The Whole Six Yards of It”, implying that the report of the baseball game beneath the headline was a complete description of it. Following this up, she discovered another example of the whole six yards from 1916 in The Mount Vernon Signal of Kentucky.
That article also says:
Yet another explanation, a particularly pervasive one, is that it was invented by fighter pilots during World War Two. It is claimed that the .50 calibre machine gun ammunition belts in an aircraft of the period measured exactly 27 feet. If the pilots fired all their ammo at a target, they would say that it got “the whole nine yards”.
Sure, that is a maybe.
I was wondering why someone didnt just read the book- which isnt bad at all. Jingoistic, but entertaining.
Thanks.
OK, I found a one-off reference to “whole nine yards” from 1855, and it refers to cloth! It’s in a story called “The Judge’s Big Shirt:”
C------ in going home that night, called at the lady’s and ordered her to go to S------'s store and get nine yards of bleached domestic and three yards of linen and make it for Judge A------. . . .
[The shirtmaker instead of making three shirts made one really big shirt.]
What a silly, stupid woman! I told her to get just enough to make three shirts; instead of making three she has put the whole nine yards into one shirt.
This story was carried in numerous newspapers in 1855, and, again, this was a one-time meaningless cite. Interestingly, it doesn’t show up in press accounts again until 1964, where it supposedly arose from the Space Program:
Give 'em the whole nine yards means an item-by-item report on any project.
This was in an article that was explaining various “space talk” terms, and this was one of them.
I mentioned “The Judge’s Big Shirt” a while back. The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be any connection between 1855 and the turn-of-the-century use of the phrase. Even with the earliest date pushed back, we are still looking at a 50 year gap.
Jonathan Ferguson of the Royal Armouries of England has put out a video on youtube on the subject of “the whole nine yards”.
For those who aren’t aware, Jonathan Ferguson is a firearms expert and makes videos on all sorts of firearms. And unlike your average gun youtuber, he has the entire collection of the Royal Armouries to back him up. For example he has a video about Saddam Hussein’s gold plated Kalashnikov, and another video about the world’s first revolver, both of which feature the actual weapons. He also does a lot of videos about weapons from video games, again, showing the actual real-life versions that inspired the in-game versions of the weapons.
So what does he say?
He has a lot to say about it.
He starts with the theory that it comes from machine gun belts (as you’d expect from someone who does weapon videos). Infantry machine guns don’t have belts anywhere close to 9 yards long. The turret gunner theory mentioned in Cecil’s article isn’t anywhere close. You can calculate out that you need about a 350 round belt to get approximately 9 yards in length (Jonathan also points out that there is quite a bit of flex in the disintegrating links between rounds so you can easily stretch or compress the belt by quite a bit). The standard load for machine gunners on bombers was 500 round boxes, so those belts are far too long.
Jonathan then looks at fighter plane belts. Some of those are kinda in the right ballpark as far as length goes, but none of them measured 9 yards. It was possible to load the guns to less than full capacity, and sometimes that was done, but there are no references whatsoever to a 9 yard belt being commonly used. Jonathan also points out that those types of fighter planes did not fire off a single gun at a time. You’d be firing multiple guns, so giving the enemy the “whole nine yards” doesn’t make any sense. You could fire a burst of rounds and get a total of nine yards of belt used, but that wouldn’t be consistent. Jonathan also says that there is no evidence that anyone ever used the phrase “the whole nine yards” in a machine gun context of any kind back in the day, and the phrase also pre-dates WWII.
Jonathan says that the phrase was used in baseball in 1907 but there is nothing in baseball that measures 9 yards.
Jonathan then references the Judge’s big shirt in 1855.
Jonathan notes that the Judge’s shirt reference is from Indiana, and the baseball reference in 1907 is also from Indiana. It may have been some sort of regionalism.
More details in the video.
And I’ll reiterate that it had no popular currency until the mid-1960s, and a press account indicates that it arose from space program jargon, without indicating where they derived it.
Gus Grissom was from Indiana (and several other astronauts), so if it was in fact an Indiana regionalism, that might explain how it ended up as space program jargon.
Not exactly proof, but it’s at least a semi-plausible theory.