whole nine-yards (3 typos corrected, in no. 5, 6 & 8)

[Stephen Goranson]

________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Stephen Goranson [goranson at DUKE.EDU]
Sent: Saturday, July 28, 2012 9:47 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: [ADS-L] whole nine-yards

1. Bonnie's important 1956 antedating, as she noted, includes a hyphen: So that's the whole nine-yards [describing "Fishing Derbies"].
Perhaps it is worth noting that a 1964 usage also joins those two words within quotation marks. (Whole or entire or full are relatively more variable.) Charles Coombs, Aerospace Pilot (NY, 1964) p 164: Before going to Edwards, you are sent to the School of Aerospace Medicine, located at Brooks Air Force Base, Texas. At Brooks they put you through the whole “nine yards,” as they say, of exhaustive physiological tests–everything from pressure chambers to treadmills. You emerge feeling battered, but you pass the physical in good shape.

2. 1956 is considerably nearer to WW II, fresher in minds then.

3. Before 1942 the collocation "the whole nine yards" is exceedingly rare. Is any pre-1942 use known other than an 1855 joke?

4. Bonnie wrote "(Me, I think it's important to see the use of the expression in context.)" I agree. So far, do the contexts comport more with a big-production than a long list? (Somewhat like a making a "federal case" out of something.)

5. I mentioned a newspaper use of "nine yards" in 1944, but did not have the citation at hand. Here it is: New York Times March 2, 1944, p. 4. To Name Liberty Ship Clapper. Washington, March 1 (AP)--The name of Raymond Clapper, newspaper columnist, will be given to a Liberty ship constructed by the shipyard having the lowest accident rate in the month-long safety contest, beginning today among nine yards, from Maine to California...

6. In the (admittedly not-yet-verified) 1957 use
--hunting was. Well, sir, it's some business--as we later found out.
These guys go the whole nine yards — no halfway stuff for them. They camp right out in the boondocks — right out there amongst them deer. You know, in tents and stuff like that. They also (and this is the horrible part) get up before daylight.--
these hunters are described as going all out by roughing it, which could be called *minimalist* in terms of *not* bringing loads of gear secondarily imagined as a long list.

7. The claim that "whole nine yards" would not have been widespread before May 27, 1961 may or may not be true, but I question the relevance of the fact that Ralph Boston set a world long jump record that day in Modesto CA. His jump was 8.24 *meters.*The jump was not measured in yards, and, in any case, the claim may have assumed that "yards" in this expression referred to linear measure yards, an assumption I suggest is unjustified. (But, now, might Nov. 29, 1959 "Nine Yard Ericson" USAF navigator, have been, to some, a double entendre? A step in the aerospace appropriation of the WW II can-do project?)(The supposed 1958 joke of doubtful relevance, recalled 50 (!) years later, has been antedated.)

8. It may be worth comparing: whole jinbang/jimbang, whole shebang, whole ball of wax, whole kit and kaboodle, whole schmear, whole megillah, whole enchillada, etc.; and suggest there is no reliable rule that a search for an origin of some of these need be fruitless.

9. To falsify my proposal that "the whole nine yards" originally referred to the 1942 and following "the whole nine yards" that built the Liberty Ships, one need only provide one pre-1942 idiomatic use.

Stephen Goranson
www.duke.edu/~goranson

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