Discovery on "Whole Nine Yards"

[Fred Shapiro]

Thanks to Dave, Jesse, and Doug for clarifying that the provenance of the
previously known early citations of "whole nine yards" is specifically an
Air Force one and that my Florida citation is quite consistent with an Air
Force provenance.  I guess we have to hope that Newspaperarchive.com and
ProQuest add more newspapers that yield other early evidence.

Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and     YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS
  Access and Lecturer in Legal Research     Yale University Press,
Yale Law School                             forthcoming
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               http://quotationdictionary.com
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