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

Mon Jun 2 15:36:04 UTC 2025

That's "roughly 65 years," of course.

JL

On Mon, Jun 2, 2025 at 8:18 AM Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> To "gaslight" is another ex., used on an episode of "I Married Joan" in
> 1953 but vanishingly rare for 75 years. And that was an undoubted example.
>
> JL
>
> On Mon, Jun 2, 2025 at 8:10 AM Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> 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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>>
>>
>> --
>> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the
>> truth."
>>
>
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>

-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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