"Whole nine yards" : some negative evidence [addendum]

[Jonathan Lighter]

There are really two questions here: the original reference of the idiom and just when it became reasonably common as a slang phrase.

There seems to be little doubt about the answer to the second question. The combination of positive and negative evidence shows pretty persuasively that before the mid-'60s the phrase, if it existed at all, was not very salient anywhere in American English.  If some combat aviators, or any identifiable group, were using the term before that, the speakers were not using it often enough to either get it into print or to make an indelible impression on very many memories.

Question: What was the average length of time it took the very large number of non-vulgar slang terms generated and used in WWII to appear in print?  I don't know, but "the whole nine yards" would be something of an oddity if it required 20+ years. Even "snafu" was rushed into print by 1941-42, despite its actual etymology, because it was colorful and amusing.  If "the whole nine yards" really referred to the mighty Axis-smashing capacity of American MG belts, and some journalist, publicist, or novelist somewhere had heard it and picked up on it, I hyperbolically guarantee that the civilian population would have learned about it hyperbolically pronto.  Maybe a 1940s cite really is lying around somewhere undiscovered, but unless it mentioned a believable etymology, question one would remain unanswered, and the answer to question two would be unchanged.

Statistically, there seems to be virtually no chance that we'll discover "the whole nine yards" to have been a well-known idiom during WWII, if it existed at all. If it did exist, its use was so restricted that it took nearly a quarter century for it to get into the mainstream, despite the 12,000,000+  American veterans who were potential vectors of the phrase.

The only position I have on the question of etymology is my strong gut feeling that the WWII (or Korean War) "MG belt" theory is a late, late folk etymology with less factual basis as the "cruise ship" theory of "posh."  (After all, anyone can verify that "Port Out, Starboard Home" can be turned into the acronym "POSH." That's partly what gives the story its appeal. But if ammo belts really were nine yards long, the etymological query would still be, "So what?")

The only explanation I can think of for a putative decades-long delay in getting an idiom like this into print, had it really been common in some branch of the military or elsewhere, would be if it had some obscene connotations. Without implying or denying a possible 1940s origin, my SWAG would be that, like "don't make waves," the phrase alludes, not to some factual "nine yards" that nobody's been able to determine after 35 years of thinking about it, but to the punch line of some grotesque phallic or scatalogical joke.

Now don't go making one up, you guys!

JL


"Douglas G. Wilson" <douglas at NB.NET> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Douglas G. Wilson"
Subject: Re: "Whole nine yards" : some negative evidence [addendum]
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>Anyway, do you Doug, or anyone else have a speculation on whether Ms.
>Shepard picked up the phrase from some of the pilots she was living with at
>the time in Vietnam, or could she have picked it up from her earlier
>association with the military?

The way it appears in "Doom Pussy" it was a pet expression of a particular
USAF navigator nicknamed Smash. That does not exclude the possibility that
it was also used by others, but it is not just used right and left by
various characters as if it were standard English. It appears once in
Smash's quoted speech, once in a passage like "what Smash would call the
whole nine yards", once in the voice of the author ("the full nine yards")
referring to a haircut with the trimmings ... which in the same episode
Smash was getting (and then Smash says some tonsorial thing or other is the
"ninth yard" [apparently "finishing touch"]). The book is semifictional, I
believe, but Smash can be identified readily enough.

Smash is deceased. Some of his colleagues from the time confirm that he did
use that expression a lot; I did not get any definite information from them
as to whether they did or didn't hear it earlier (at least one said he
couldn't remember, it seems like it's been around forever, but maybe it
could have come from Smash). I'm not sure how popular that book was among
USAF personnel when it was new: is it possible that this book itself was
important in popularizing the phrase within the USAF ... and/or outside?

-- Doug Wilson


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