Possibly the whole nine yards of it?

[Michael B Quinion]

The British journalist John Morrish writes, among other regular
pieces, the "Frantic Semantics" column in the Daily Telegraph each
Saturday. Like most writers on language, he has been bothered from
time to time by people asking about the origin of "the whole nine
yards".

He has recently made some equiries, he tells me, of the Imperial War
Museum at Duxford in Cambridgeshire, which he is happy for me to pass
on. One of the Museum staff measured the length of the ammunition
belts of the Browning machine guns as used in the Flying Fortress and
Spitfire aircraft, and found them to be ... exactly 27 feet long.
John confirms that he also contacted a company in the US that sells
reconditioned Browning machine guns (don't ask) and they confirmed
the length of the belt.

What is intriguing, apart from its being a neat piece of evidence in
favour of the wartime machine gun thesis, is that any number of
people writing on language (myself included) could have made these
enquiries at any time, but comparatively few seem to have done so!

As John says, it will hardly settle the argument, but it does put
another nail in the coffin of the theory about ready-mixed concrete.


--
Michael Quinion