the 1966 "nine yards" audience listed

[Stephen Goranson]

Thanks for your comments, Doug, if I may call you that, sir, while observing
that your posts here are to me often among the most interesting from any list
entity.

Your alternate hypothesis of "...a list nine yards long...a list as long as your
arm" appears to be a bit of a stretch, for most arms, and, frankly, less
stringent logic or less high-quality "wool-gathering" than I've come ordinarily
to expect from you. It does not address the observation that the earliest known
uses do not well conduce to clarity with linear measure yards. It does not
account for the apparent twentieth-century U.S. orgin, one that calls for a new
thing, something that technology, say defense contracting, supplies, say,
ambitious, assembly-line welded inelegant but numerous and world-war-winning
ships made at nine hastily-constructed new shipyards (since the Navy had
already booked up the old ones). And when might another spurt of this U.S.
technology and defense contracting come with a spurt in the use of the phrase,
borrowed from WWII: post-Sputnik era, perhaps? (BTY, coincidental trivia: Land
worked with Joseph Kennedy on the Maritime Commission; JFK boosted space
defense contracting.) So, instead of a putative unattested-as-relevant long arm
equivalent to U.S. 8 1/2 by 11 inch pages of some mixed number, we have an
attested 1942 "the whole nine yards" which rather resembles the so-far 1964ff
"the whole nine yards." (Again strikes Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote?)

good morning,
Stephen Goranson
http://www.duke.edu/~goranson

Quoting "Douglas G. Wilson" <douglas at NB.NET>:

> I will present the casual opinions of a relative [some would say
> nearly absolute] nonentity (i.e., me).
>
>> .... Is there a better hypothesis?
>
> There are some which I like better (i.e., find more likely/plausible).
>
> Here is one: an exhaustive list of things was called a "nine-yard
> list" or a "list nine yards long" [meaning just "a very long list",
> cf. "a list as long as your arm" etc.], thence <<Should I list
> _everything_? / Yep, give 'em the whole nine yards.>>
>
> Not very sexy, but reasonably plausible and not falsifiable AFAIK.
>
> Quite possibly the real story is one nobody has mentioned at all.
>
> [Who would have guessed that "say 'uncle'" came from a joke about a
> parrot? But I think it very probably did (I posted the evidence here
> some time ago and Quinion presented it recently).]
>
>> Does anyone know that 1942 is too early?
>
> I don't think anybody knows that.
>
>> Do slang phrases never arise from a non-metaphoric original?
>
> I believe they often do.
>
>> Do others care to declare this proposal excluded from consideration?
>
> I don't. I'd put it way down the list, but who cares where I'd put
> it? As the data come in (more old stuff digitized, etc.) we will learn more.
>
>> Does anyone dispute that appearance in Air Academy slang does not
>> necessarily mean it started there (or, similarly, in NASA)?
>
> I don't dispute that at all. But Armed Forces origin is a good guess
> for slang in many cases IMHO.
>
> -- Doug Wilson
>
>
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