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

Mon Jun 2 14:02:15 UTC 2025

Jokes may circulate orally long after they are considered "chestnuts" and unworthy of publication. And I wonder if the phrase appears in joke collections from the intervening years that have not been digitized.

-----Original Message-----
From: "Jonathan Lighter" <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
Sent: Monday, June 2, 2025 8:10am
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: [ADS-L] Minor Questionable Square-Bracketed Antedating of "Whole Nine Yards"

I don't believe that it necessarily strains credulity at all. There's a
difference between currency and mere existence.

If only a few people - say, a few families, or one family - had adopted the
phrase from the joke in 1855, it could easily have taken fifty years to
have become sufficiently known to appear in print, even locally.

Even though they existed, printed exx. were so rare before roughly the
1960s that we were amazed when Bonnie was able to dig up the relatively few
exx. going back as far as 1907-08.

Fred's 2023 discovery of a 1934 "woke" - thirty years before the OED and
eighty years before it gained wide currency - seems like a good parallel.
And "woke" is arguably a more plausible idiom to begin with.

We know that figurative "the whole nine yards" was once quite rare. Whether
there's a substantive connection between the joke and the idiom, or whether
they're coincidental, is simply unknown. And, at least for the moment,
unknowable.

JL

On Mon, Jun 2, 2025 at 7:22 AM Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu> wrote:

> Yes, to me the key point is that the shirt anecdote, after a small amount
> of obscure newspaper coverage in 1855, disappeared. To think it emerged a
> half-century later to inspire the "whole nine yards" idiom strains
> credulity.
>
> Fred Shapiro
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of
> Stephen Goranson <0000179d4093b2d6-dmarc-request at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Sent: Monday, June 2, 2025 6:20 AM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Subject: Re: Minor Questionable Square-Bracketed Antedating of "Whole Nine
> Yards"
>
> I agree that the true earliest known citations in the current sense were
> found by Bonnie Taylor-Blake.
>
> Though I haven't looked into this lately, I recall that the shirt joke was
> reprinted several times in 1855.
> But that (a) it is, for the origin of the later use, an irrelevant
> statement, and
> (b) additionally, unlike some jokes, it was most probably unknown to a
> later generation, so this may be a case in which the last known use is as
> significant as the first known use.
>
> Stephen
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of
> Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU>
> Sent: Sunday, June 1, 2025 8:27 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Subject: Minor Questionable Square-Bracketed Antedating of "Whole Nine
> Yards"
>
> 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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