"the whole nine yards" 1942 (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Clai Rice]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Laurence Horn [mailto:laurence.horn at YALE.EDU]
> Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2007 7:42 PM
> Subject: Re: "the whole nine yards" 1942 (UNCLASSIFIED)
>
> At 8:26 PM -0400 7/11/07, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:
> >>   I would have expected Land to have said "_all_ nine yards." ....
> >
> >I made about the same argument with respect to a "nine yard"
> >etymological hypothesis on this list in 2004, and somebody else made
> >about the same argument before I did.
> >
> >However, back when N'archive search was more effective, I
> did a casual
> >search for expressions such "the whole nine men" and found a
> whole lot
> >of instances of such expressions in otherwise unremarkable prose.
> >Perhaps "the whole [number] [general plural noun]" is not really so
> >unusual as I (inter alia) had thought (although I still
> agree "all ..."
> >would be more usual here).
> >
> I'm not so sure, although I agree it would be more normal in
> most contexts.  But consider the local exchange:
>
> >  Senator BURTON. So that you have involved here a
> tremendous expansion
> > in  production, and you are shooting for a 50-percent
> increase or more
> > than a  50-percent increase in seven out of nine plants.  Admiral
> > VICKERY. That is right, and they have got to make that to hit the
> > schedules.  Admiral [Emory S.] LAND. You have to increase
> from 7.72 to 12 for the  average at
> >  the bottom of that fifth column, for the whole nine yards.
>
> This seems to be a mass, not a count, use.  The nine yards in
> question are being treated as a single entity or unit whose
> production is at issue.  So even though we've just heard
> about a goal of a 50% increase in 7 out of 9 plants/yards,
> which *does* involve an itemization of particular yards, the
> response by Admiral Land refers to what needs to be done at
> the collectively by the whole nine-yard enterprise.
>
> LH
>
I second Larry on this reading and add that the excerpt quoted above
clipped off BURTON and VICKERY's conventional uses of the phrase "as a
whole":

> Senator [Harold H.] BURTON....therefore you see a possibility of
> actually increasing the percentage of gain by 50 percent in these
> yards as a whole. Admiral [Howard L.] VICKERY. In the yards as a
> whole.

Vickery carefully confirms Burton's understanding by repeating the
phrase that explicitly identifies the whole output as being expressed as
a single average. So Land's use of "whole" is sanctioned not only by the
local semantics but also the discourse context, where repetition is
cohesive and accommodating.

Clai Rice

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org