First Reactions to Bonnie Taylor-Blake's Latest "Whole Nine Yards" Discoveries

[Shapiro, Fred]

Wow!  I assume, Bonnie, that these citations come from recent additions to the Newspaperarchive corpus?

I don't want to be one of those people who resist the implications of new discoveries in order to defend their own pet theories or their own previous discoveries.  Here are my initial reactions, trying to be as dispassionate as possible:

1.  Bonnie's new discoveries can certainly be viewed as restoring the primacy of "whole nine yards" as opposed to "whole six yards."  However, the 1912 earliest occurrences of "whole six yards" are still early enough that we could surmise that the number of yards was variable in early usage, and the number "nine" may not have been crucial to the original metaphor.

2.  Indiana is close to Kentucky, so that region is still likely to be the provenance of the idiom.

3.  As Bonnie probably already saw, Newspaperarchive also has a possible 1916 occurrence of "whole nine yards" from the Greensburg Weekly Democrat, March 23, 1916.  This too is in Indiana.

4.  I concede Bonnie's point that the congruence of "nine yards" with "nine innings" in her 1907 "full nine yards" citation may well be coincidental.

5.  These discoveries are the final nail in the coffin for World War II-related theories of the etymology of "whole nine yards," and presumably for the concrete truck theory as well.

Fred Shapiro

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