"Whole Nine Yards": 1971 Citation

[Jonathan Lighter]

This quote is probably misleading. A "yard" has meant $100 since ca1930 or earlier. If anybody ever referred to $1000 as "the whole nine yards," it must have been in a context where the thousand was "all of it."  Or else the informant was making a little joke.

Or so it seems to me. By 1971, "the whole nine yards" had become pretty common.

JL

Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Fred Shapiro
Subject: "Whole Nine Yards": 1971 Citation
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Has anyone already mentioned the following 1971 citation for "whole nine
yards"?

AS TO HOW MUCH is a "yard," it's $100, I'm told. And "The whole nine
yards" is $1,000. Or so say the game-table-boys.
Burlington (N.C.) Times-News, August 11, 1971, page 20-A
(Newspaperarchive)

This early citation seems actually to have some explanatory etymological
content, in a non-Vietnam context, although why $1,000 should be nine
yards instead of ten yards is not clear. There is nothing else in the
column from which this comes that sheds any other light on the term's
meaning or origin.

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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