whole nine yards (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Stephen Goranson]

Replies to Bill and Fred (plus, thank you, Bonnie!):

To Bill:
Yes, the original 9 emergency shipyards have been identified (list below). And yes other shipyards later also built "Liberty Ships" (assembly-line-made cargo vessels), in (I think) the largest shipbuilding project in history. You may determine whether the initial 9 yards can be remembered years later. By the way, I have not yet seen a copy (interlibrary loan said no one would send it) of Liberty ships: twenty years later / Alexander Shaw 1961 [1961, a potentially-interesting year...]
[iv], 143 p. ; 28 cm. [Belair, Md. : A. Shaw].

>From F. C. Lane, Ships for victory; a history of shipbuilding under the United States Maritime Commission in World War II  (Baltimore; Johns Hopkins: 1951) p.51, the nine yards:

South Portland, Me.-- the Todd-Bath Iron Shipbuilding Corp.
Baltimore, Md. --Bethlehem-Fairfield Yard
Wilmington, N.C.--North Carolina Shipbuilding Co.
Mobile, Ala.--Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Co.
New Orleans, La.--Delta Shipbuilding Co.
Houston, Texas--Houston Shipbuilding Corp.
Los Angeles (Terminal Island), Cal-- California Shipbuilding Corp.
Richmond, Cal--Todd-California Shipbuilding Corp.
Portland, Oregon-- Oregon Shipbuilding Corp.

To Fred:
I do not entirely know how she asked her Father, i.e., beyond what she told me and what is posted at Straight Dope Message Board. I did not prompt her to prompt any particular response. Nor am I sure exactly which of my mails he received and read and which she read. She mentioned a (one) misplaced letter. I wrote him two paper letters to two different addresses on two different dates. The first letter did not mention ships; the second letter did. The Jan. 2011 email forwarded to her did not, though it did link to Ben Zimmer's treatment (as mentioned earlier) that gives a list of proposals, including "naval shipyards."

She wrote 29 Jan 2011:
"...In the meantime, my father is quite lucid about what believes to be the origin of "the whole nine yards."  He did not hesitate to say that he thought it derived from a WWII program to arm the nation and specifically build the navy.  He thought it referred to ship building yards on the east coast and always thought there were nine of them, though he couldn't verify that for sure...."

Stephen Goranson
http://www.duke.edu/~goranson
________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Shapiro, Fred [fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU]
Sent: Wednesday, February 09, 2011 12:26 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: [ADS-L] whole nine yards (UNCLASSIFIED)

Stephen, can you tell us whether the shipyards etymology was volunteered by the daughter without any prompting, or whether you mentioned it to her as a possibility?

Fred Shapiro



________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Mullins, Bill AMRDEC [Bill.Mullins at US.ARMY.MIL]
Sent: Wednesday, February 09, 2011 12:20 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: whole nine yards (UNCLASSIFIED)

Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE

Have the nine shipyards spoken of by Adm Land in 1942 ever been
identified?  Were there more of them by the end of the war?

If nine is an accurate count for only a short period of time in
mid-1942, and by the end of the war more plants had come on-line, then
it seems odd that media 15 years later would remember only "nine yards".

I'm not saying this is the case, but it seems to be an issue that would
have to be investigated and ruled out for Stephen's hypothesis to hold
true.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On
Behalf Of
> Stephen Goranson
> Sent: Wednesday, February 09, 2011 6:38 AM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Re: whole nine yards
>
>
> Hypothesis: the actual WW II nine shipyards for Liberty Ships and
their
> unprecedented production were recalled in some US media (not
necessarily books
> or newspapers), post-Sputnik, in a call to a similar can-do push for
aerospace
> production. and the phrase became applied in other settings as well,
though
> aerospace tradents (including government contractors) were significant
in the
> first decade and more.
>
>
Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE

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