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

Mon Jun 2 16:08:22 UTC 2025

Jonathan Lighter wrote:

> 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.

Some time ago, after noticing a then-new revision to its "whole nine
yards" entry, I griped here about the OED's reliance on "The Judge's
Big Shirt" as a possible point of origin for the expression. (See
https://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2016-January/140388.html,
but also see below.)

Jon gently and wisely talked me off the ledge then, reminding me that
we have this 50-year lag between the so-far earliest appearances of
WNY and "The Judge's Big Shirt" and that much could've circulated
orally or been rarely captured in print during this period. I agree,
unknowable, then.

It's also possible that a comedic song popular, though never or rarely
written down, in, say, the mid-19th century featured "the whole nine
yards" and that its existence was unknown or little remembered in the
first half of the 20th century. Perhaps a humorist traveling parts of
the South and Upland South in the last half of the 19th century had a
bit that featured the expression, which tickled his audiences.

In thinking about this, though, I often recall that "the whole nine
yards" and "the whole six yards" essentially co-existed in parts of
Kentucky ca. 1910. For example, the two were used within a distance of
about 12 miles (as the crow flies) ca. 1915, indicating that they were
both understood and accepted by folks in north central Kentucky at the
time.

1914, Gest: https://www.newspapers.com/article/henry-county-local-whole-nine-yards-32/149207607/
1916, Owenton: https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-news-herald-whole-six-yards-41316/152693697/

When did the "six yards" form emerge? Was it simply a "mistaken" form
of "the whole nine yards"? At the moment it's unknowable. (BTW, "the
whole six yards" was in place in north central Arkansas at least by
1917.)

If "The Judge's Big Shirt" with its "the whole nine yards" had been
influential in the development of the idiom, something somewhere
must've happened to its telling between 1855 and and the turn of the
century. That or it was common to mistakenly and simply switch the
number "nine" to "six." (And we have a teeny tiny sliver of a shadow
of a hint suggesting -- or not -- that an idiomatic "the whole three
yards" may have been in place in Hillsborough, North Carolina, in
1882. https://www.newspapers.com/article/orange-county-observer-orange-county-obs/582854/.)

-- Bonnie

On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 2:43 PM Bonnie Taylor-Blake
<b.taylorblake at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I've noticed that the OED has updated its entry for "the whole nine
> yards" in the online edition.
>
> Kudos to the editors for the December, 2015 revision.  It's great to
> see those early 20th-century uses of the idiom.  The entry also
> helpfully mentions, "Early examples are all from the same district on
> the border of Indiana and Kentucky. A parallel expression, the whole
> six yards, is occasionally attested in the early 20th cent."  (By the
> way, all this is under the entry for "nine"; see A.3.e.)
>
> Further, the entry includes, "Apparently originating in the frequently
> repeated comic story cited in quot. 1855."
>
> The OED's 1855 quotation [1], not unfamiliar to this group, is this:
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> [1855   New Albany (Indiana) Daily Ledger 30 Jan. 1/4   ‘The Judge's
> Big Shirt’... What a silly, stupid woman! I told her to get just
> enough to make three shirts; instead of making three, she has put the
> whole nine yards into one shirt!]
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> (You can find the full text of "The Judge's Big Shirt" at [2], below.)
>
> I'm curious about the OED's commitment to "Apparently originating in
> [that] frequently repeated comic story," so I thought I'd throw the
> anecdote back out there, even though (and forgive me) it's already
> come up quite a bit here.
>
>
> What do we know about "The Judge's Big Shirt"?
>
> Here's something from the newspaper Spirit of the Age (Raleigh, North
> Carolina; 6 June 1855, p. 2, column 5):
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> THE JUDGES BIG SHIRT. -- A story bearing the above caption, we find
> floating about among our exchanges, sometimes without credit, and
> sometimes with the paternity given to the Cleveland Dispatch.  The
> story first appeared in the Spirit of the Age.  It was related to us
> by a gentleman in Elizabeth City [North Carolina] last November; and
> on our return home we wrote it out and published it in the Age.  The
> parties said to have participated in the amusing incidents related,
> are still living, and all but one are residents of this City
> [Raleigh].
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> The last two sentences are noteworthy, I think, because they give that
> the facts of the story, such as they may have been, took place some
> time (perhaps a good while) before the writer was told the tale and
> that by November 1854 the anecdote was known 140 miles, as the crow
> flies, from Raleigh.
>
> The first published version of "The Judge's Big Shirt" indeed seems to
> have appeared in Spirit of the Age, printed on the front page of the 3
> January 1855 issue (column 5).  I can't find any earlier appearances
> of the same or of obviously related variants in any other publication.
>
> Newspapers all over the country reprinted the story in 1855, so I
> suppose "The Judge's Big Shirt" was in that year "frequently
> repeated," as the OED notes.
>
> But the number of times it appeared in print after 1855 must be quite
> small; in the historical databases I thought to search I was never
> able to find it published after 1855.  Nor have I been able to find
> later versions that have even minor resemblances to the 1855 form.
> That's not to say that "The Judge's Big Shirt" didn't circulate by
> word of mouth before 1855 (we know it was told at least once, in late
> 1854) or after 1855, but it sure seems to have been pretty absent from
> newspapers outside of that 1855 flurry.
>
> I'll note, though, that in the spring of 1855 the anecdote was used in
> a commentary on a court case, again in North Carolina:
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> In another column is the story of the Big Shirt, which we had suffered
> to "pass," until the Albemarle suggested that Judge Saunders must have
> had that shirt on, when the [sic] charged the Buncombe Grand Jury.
> The idea is a capital one, bearing reason in its face.  That shirt his
> Honor must have worn at Buncombe Court to protect his outer man
> against the mountain winds; and with the voluptuous tail tucked in his
> unwhisperables the Grand Jury supposed that he had his nether anatomy
> fortified with numerous volumes of law, from which would be batched
> out the most erudite opinions during the sitting; and hence the
> presentment on which it was supposed the Know Nothings would be
> exterminated root and branch. -- *Fay. Argus.*
>
> [From "The Big Shirt," The Semi-Weekly Raleigh (North Carolina)
> Register, 6 June 1855, p. 2, column 5.  This piece seems to have
> originally appeared in The Fayetteville (North Carolina) Argus;
> presumably "the Albemarle" was something published elsewhere in the
> state or in neighboring states.]
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> A very minor point, for what it's worth.  In the above, the imagery
> hangs on that big shirt; it's given (jokingly) that the big shirt --
> the premise is that it was worn for protection -- may have been
> mistaken for "numerous volumes of law," leading to "the most erudite
> opinions."  On the other hand, in this commentary on Judge Saunders
> there's no repetition or reinforcement of yardage of linen contained
> in the shirt -- no "nine yards" that we see in the original anecdote
> ("The Judge's Big Shirt") -- that's at the core of the idiom.
>
> Are there other examples of its incorporation or retelling?  What at
> the moment other than its frequent reprinting in 1855 suggests that
> "The Judge's Big Shirt" was especially influential?
>
>
> I can hear Fred Shapiro and others wondering why I haven't mentioned
> Richard Bucci's find in an 1850 Missouri newspaper of an interesting
> figurative use of "nine yards" [3], so I'll mention it now, because
> that discovery hints that a proto-idiomatic form of "the whole nine
> yards" may have been in use in Missouri a few years before the
> non-idiomatic "the whole nine yards" of "The Judge's Big Shirt" ever
> appeared in print in North Carolina.  Was an oral form of the anecdote
> so old that it made its way to Missouri before 1850?
>
> I don't know if there's enough evidence for the idiom "apparently
> originating" in "The Judge's Big Shirt."  Acknowledging the anecdote
> in the entry is very important, but maybe the more speculative, but
> still charitable "perhaps originating" would do better.
>
> -- Bonnie
>
>
> [1] The New Albany (Indiana) Daily Ledger citation (30 January) should
> probably be replaced by a 3 January 1855 sighting from Raleigh, North
> Carolina.
>
> [2] "The Judge's Big Shirt," in full,
>
> http://idnc.library.illinois.edu/cgi-bin/illinois?a=d&d=SJO18550414.2.26
>
> or http://tinyurl.com/jk63ffn
>
> [3] Fred's April, 2015 announcement of Mr. Bucci's find:
>
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2015-April/136840.html
>
> or http://tinyurl.com/z2rz6vv

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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