full/whole xx yards (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Bonnie Taylor-Blake]

On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 2:53 PM, Mullins, Bill AMRDEC
<Bill.Mullins at us.army.mil> wrote:

> I suggested otherwise, summarizing some of the findings of the members
> of this list.  The discussion went on into "full/whole nine yards", and
> I summarized some of the "six yards"/Kentucky findings of late.  As part
> of that, I asked "What was the vector [of the expression from rural
> Kentucky] into the mil/aero communities?", and got this back: "Mighta
> been some hotshot from West Virginia."

Maybe so (Chuck Yeager or otherwise), but I often wonder whether --
when it comes to an apparent military connection -- the basic
expression was essentially carried into the military (1930s? 1940s?)
by any number of recruits from, say, the foothills of the Cumberland
Mountains and the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and points in
between.  Perhaps this influx was sufficient to get the ball rolling,
a presence enough to germinate the expression within the armed
services.  (We've got this small cluster of sightings coming out of
Rockcastle County, Kentucky, in the second decade of the last century,
but we also have that isolated instance coming out of Spartanburg,
South Carolina, just five or so years later, which seems to suggest an
association with areas around the southern Applachians.  Granted,
that's only an n = 4.)

On the other hand, I sometimes think about this seeming geographical
distribution and want to find significance in that, but then I stop
and remind myself that we're at the mercy of what digitizers of
various publications are making available to us at any moment, so
we're finding these things through that filter and trying to make
sense of data that's coming to us via Google and whatnot.  I'm sure
we'll find other patterns as we go along.

Along that line, though, I often wonder about that military connection.

It's interesting to me that none of the five post-WWII sightings of
"the whole nine yards" (and variants) that preceded the 1964 article
on NASA slang has any obvious links to the military or to aviation.
None of these (four) users (1956-1962) of "the whole nine yards" (and
variants) had served in the military.  The printed examples were not
set in a military context; they did not appear in publications linked
to the military.  And then we observe a bloom of sightings related to
the military/aviation starting in about 1964.

When I asked (civilian) Ron Rhody, who was responsible for the 1956
and 1957 (non-military) usages, about the seeming association of "the
whole nine yards" with the 1960s-era military, he speculated that
military men of the day just had more opportunities to be written
about and quoted than did their non-military brothers.  I think that's
an interesting thought, one that may have strengthened the feeling of
"the whole nine yards" as a sort of mysterious military shibboleth.

In the end, I do believe that members of the 1960s-era military played
a major part in popularizing the expression, bringing it to government
circles and the public at large in the 1960s and 1970s, but I suspect
we shouldn't discount that a pretty good number of civilians may have
been already well acquainted with the expression by the 1950s.  And we
may not need a Chuck Yeager to explain why "the whole nine yards"
seemed to explode out of the military about 50 years ago.

Of course, it goes without saying that this is all just speculation (I
don't know more than anyone else), but it is kind of fun to speculate.
 (And I thank Bill for getting me thinking again.)

-- Bonnie

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