Dressed to the Nines

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Matt Voss. I’m calling from Indianapolis.

Hi, Matt. How are you doing today?

Pretty good, thanks. Thanks for having me on the show.

Sure. Welcome to the program.

Yeah, thanks. The question I had was regarding the origin of the phrase, dressed to the nines. So I typically know that as people who are dressed very well, but I wondered kind of where that came from and if there are any other variations on the phrase. Like, you know, if you didn’t have enough money to spend, can you be dressed to the fives or the threes or things like that?

I know.

I’m dressed to the one right now.

That’s great.

Yeah, and what got you to wondering about this?

You know, well, I listened to your show on the radio, so I just said, hey, you know, I really wonder where that phrase comes from. So I decided one day to just call.

Okay.

Good idea.

Good enough.

Except that the truth is with this one, we have no idea, Matthew. None.

Get out the sad trombone.

So what’s his consolation prize?

No, this is one of those things where there are a million theories, many of them specious, a lot of them invented, most of them rubbish. And the data is sparse and the intent is malicious. It’s a big, what I always call them is the orig onk, origin unknown. But, you know, you can find a lot of these theories discussed in a variety of reference books. Some of them will talk as if they’ve solved the problem for all time, and yet you’ll find that they have a date problem where they say it comes from, you know, 1850. And in fact, the dress to the nines is a lot older than that, isn’t it, Martha?

Yeah.

And the expression up to the nines or just nine since the early 18th century is meant to perfection or the highest degree or point. And we really don’t know why, except that nine has been sort of a special number with the nine muses and what, eight wonders of the world plus one?

Right, right.

Yeah.

So, Matthew, we’re just going to be honest with you and tell you that we don’t know. Can you believe it?

Okay, well, no, I can’t believe it. But I’ll tell you what we’re going to do is if we find out more, we’ll make sure to tell you about it, all right?

Okay, thank you so much.

One of these days we’re going to get to the bottom of this and we’ll be famous, Martha. Dressed to the nines will be solved once and for all.

Right.

All right.

Well, I’ll be listening.

Thank you so much for calling.

Okay.

Thanks.

Thanks, Matt.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Dressed to the one, Martha.

You said you were dressed to the ones. Isn’t that in the buff?

No, that’s dressed to the zero.

Oh, okay.

Oh, man.

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