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

[Stephen Goranson]

Since I got the etymology of whole nine yards wrong, here, twice (!), for my sins I, now, briefly, but at greater length if need be, suggest I eventually became somewhat familiar with mistaken etymologies of this collocation.

The 1850 nine yards was not about cloth--what is a nine yards shirt anyway?---but about a long text.

In addition to the list archives, see Gerald Cohen, "News item: Richard Bucci finds an 1850 'nine yards" attestation referring to a lengthy verbal account; 'nine yards' here expresses inordinate length; Garson O'Toole adds a 'six yard poem' (1895) and two petitions 'about four yards long' (1847) and 'some six yards long' (1847)," Comments on Etymology 45/1 (October, 2015) 11-17.

Recall "an indictment of a lawyer that filled a sheet nine yards long" from1655!
The Beginnings of the English Newspaper, Joseph Frank, 1961 page 239.

And the multiple (!) pre-1855 attestations of X yards of poetry or verse. (I'll try to dig them up if seems useful.)

(To play fair, again, there is the story, "Nine Yards of Other Cloth," 1958—but it is, in more than one sense, an outlier from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.)

Stephen Craft Goranson
Durham, NC

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