"Whole Nine Yards" and Occam's Razor, etc.

[Douglas G. Wilson]

>I have a somewhat different theory up on which I might even try to follow.
>;-) If you look at that 1855 judge/shirt joke, it really isn't funny unless
>the "whole nine yards" phrase is recognizable from another context.

I don't think it's all that funny anyway. But tastes vary ... and
also the fashion in newspaper jokes 150+ years ago was different from
today. The story as I read it was not presented as a joke 'proper'
but rather as a 'true funny story', so "nine yards" may have been (1)
the amount which really was used (if the story was true) or (2) an
arbitrary much-too-large amount (whether the story was basically true
or not). Surely the story would have been about the same with 10 or 8
yards. Or if he had said "all 12 yards" or "the whole batch of cloth"
or whatever.

>In other
>words, I can imagine that at the telling of the joke the voice is raised
>during the pronouncing of "the whole nine yards" as the point of the joke is
>to make ironic reference to the phrase.

But we have no evidence of this whatsoever. And in my experience
newspaper jokes then were even much less subtle than now.

>That would say to me there was at
>that time a phrase "the whole nine yards" in common use that was being/had
>been used in another context and that the joke makes fun of that expression.
>Perhaps some judge or politician had used the expression that then passed
>into ironic use. If someone 150 years from now came across a Jay Leno joke
>the punch line of which was "Mission Accomplished!", and if that person did
>not know Leno was making fun of a presidential quote that had come in for
>considerable public derision, he would wonder what the joke was about. I
>think it may be worth poking around in records from that era to see if the
>phrase was in fact known and to what it referred.

I and my betters have so poked already. But of course the archive
search functions are not reliable, and the archives grow all the time ....

As mentioned previously here and elsewhere, nine yards was a rather
conventional quantity of cloth considered typical for making a
woman's dress, and "nine yards of calico" can be identified
(sparsely) as a metaphor meaning "a woman". By the early 20th
century, I think this was considered archaic and there were
occasional light remarks to the effect that this was an excessive
amount in modern times ... which may or may not have influenced the
use of this particular quantity in the astronaut's 1967 joke.

-- Doug Wilson


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