All wool and a yard wide means “reliable and trustworthy.” The phrase was part of advertisements in the late 19th century, touting material produced by textile mills that wasn’t shoddy, which meant it was not made from the shredded fiber of old scraps. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “All Wool and a Yard Wide”
Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Sam from Dallas. Hi, Sam. Welcome to the show. Hey, Sam.
Well, thank you. When I was growing up, my daddy always had a phrase he used in the description of people whom he trusted, who were of good character, sort of like the Boy Scout, trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, so forth. He would always say that person, either she or he, is a person is all wool and a yard wide. And I’ve always wondered where that came from. I don’t know what it means. Is there an origin for that?
There is an origin to that. So for you, it means what the person is trustworthy? That’s correct. So reliable and trustworthy. All right. So I know this predates us all, but back in the era of big textile mills in this country where wool was processed to make clothing, certainly as late as the late 1880s, there was a company out of New York that advertised that its fabric for its clothes was all wool and a yard wide. And this slogan was picked up by many other companies as well. And what they meant was, is that the fabric wasn’t like they didn’t cheat it a little bit, make it a little less wide than a yard, but also that it wasn’t shoddy.
And now by shoddy, S-H-O-D-D-Y, I don’t mean our current use of shoddy. I mean the former use of shoddy, where shoddy was the name for cloth that was made from scrap cloth, where you would gather up all the clothing and shred it and have this like really fine fiber base and then make like a almost felted or not quite wool material out of it. And so it tended to come apart easy, but you could use it for cheap clothing or filling and cushions and that sort of thing. And so this shoddy material, this manufacturer, I want to let people know I haven’t simply bought up bales of used cloth and shredded it and made new clothes out of it. This is the original wool stuff. It’s exactly a yard wide and you can trust me on that.
So it’s like an advertising slogan?
Yeah, an advertising slogan. You can actually look in old newspapers and still find it like zillions of them in the 1800s that used all wool in a yard wide. And by the late 1800s it started to be used colloquially and figuratively to refer to somebody who was true to their word.
Well, that’s really interesting because I used to go to the fabric store with my mother and see the big bolts of fabric and those huge tables. And then my daddy would use this phrase, and I thought there was probably some connection, but I didn’t know what.
Well, there we go.
Yeah.
There you go.
Wow.
Well, that’s perfect. I really appreciate your taking my question.
Thank you.
It’s our pleasure.
And, you know, Sam, at one point it got altered a little bit, and it was just shortened to all wool. And you’ll still occasionally sometimes see somebody say, yeah, he’s all wool. But that’s, again, just the shortened version of the whole expression, he’s all wool in a yard wide.
Very good.
Very good.
Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Thank you, Sam.
Thank you.
We love the show.
Oh, thank you very much. Really appreciate it.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
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