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Where Did We Get “The Whole Nine Yardsâ€? At Visual Thesaurus, Friend of the Program Ben Zimmer summarizes the latest findings in the hunt for the long-sought origins of the expression “the whole nine yards.â€
books.google.com via NGRAMS comes up with three valid occurrences before 1960. Working backwards, the 1957 book has the explicit meaning of "everything". So does the 1942 Senate testimony. They do not address the origin, but it would be nice if the Google results were more than just snippet views.
Then, there is the 1855 occurrence in Yankee Notions. It is a very big gap between 1855 and 1942. It seems incredulous for a phrase to be in the vernacular but not in print for so long. But, there may be reasons to seriously consider the Yankee Notions story as a potential origin. Yankee Notions was a monthly humor magazine which was also annually collected and bound into a book. Being a book gave it more permanence than just being a magazine and would give exposure to its stories twice. It also reprinted stories from the more ephemeral newspapers, see here (a reference and text from the original article is here). A third reason might be that the story was funny enough to repeat verbally, but not funny enough to get back into print.
There might be other reasons, but I have to admit that 87 years is a long time between the earliest two printings listed here. (But, it is also 15 years between the second and third).
That citation from the 1850s complains that, having boughten 9 yards of cloth to make 3 shirts, the seamstress had used all of it on one shirt. The idion means everything, but everything would mean the whole bolt, wouldn't it?
Reference Quarterly reported in 1960 that
Irene M. Smith and the staff of the State Library of Florida, Tallahassee, are puzzled about the expression, “the whole nine yards.”
That would cap things as the latest date for the idiom to appear. The 1957 Kentucky Happy Hunting Ground uses the idiom as if everybody understands it.
The Yale Alumni Magazine reports:
An article in the Mount Vernon (Kentucky) Signal of May 17, 1912, states: “But there is one thing sure, we dems would never have known that there was such crookedness in the Rebublican [sic] party if Ted and Taft had not got crossed at each other. Just wait boys until the fix gets to a fever heat and they will tell the whole six yards.” And again, in the June 28, 1912, issue: “As we have been gone for a few days and failed to get all the news for this issue we will give you the whole six yards in our next.”
But what about the 1942 Senate hearings? Admiral Land kept referring to the nine yards in which emergency construction of ships was taking place, and uses "the whole none yards" once. It seems to me that he likely is responsible for inflating the yardage from six to none. But I can'y figure out how to get any ngrams out of whole six yards.
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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