[Ads-l] Minor Questionable Square-Bracketed Antedating of "Whole Nine Yards"

[Shapiro, Fred]

I have an antedating of the OED's entry for "whole nine yards" that will not come as a surprise to Bonnie Taylor Blake or other people who have researched that expression, and that I do not even believe should be treated as an antedating.  But the OED has a square-bracketed first use (in the OED, square brackets indicate the citation is not strictly or not certainly an example of the headword), a humorous anecdote about quantity of cloth.  I do not agree that that anecdote is the source of the "whole nine yards" idiom, but I can help the OED by pointing out a slightly earlier appearance of the anecdote.

whole nine yards (OED, 30 Jan. 1855 square-bracketed first use)

1855 Spirit of the Age (Raleigh, N.C.) 3 Jan. 1/6 (Chronicling America)  I told him to get just enough to make three shirts; but instead of making three she has put the whole nine yards in to one shirt !

NOTE: In my opinion the true earliest known citations, found by Bonnie Taylor Blake, are dated 1907 ("full nine yards") and 1908 ("whole nine yards").

Fred Shapiro

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