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

Mon Jun 2 21:01:14 UTC 2025

Wow, Jon, this is completely awesome.  I will never doubt you again.  Do you mind if I pass on this information to the OED ?  Would you rather do that yourself ?

Fred Shapiro

________________________________
From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
Sent: Monday, June 2, 2025 3:44 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Subject: Re: Minor Questionable Square-Bracketed Antedating of "Whole Nine Yards"

https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DC2zrd2ajQIw&data=05%7C02%7Cfred.shapiro%40YALE.EDU%7C0b71db0da0404b9b671308dda20df4ca%7Cdd8cbebb21394df8b4114e3e87abeb5c%7C0%7C0%7C638844903303842237%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C60000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=FiiNku6PfuBpS%2BulxKDEXvDYeY2o51XJz7NKgwt0Clk%3D&reserved=0<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2zrd2ajQIw>

Season One, Episode 19, "Draft Board." The air date (33 seconds in) is Feb.
18, 1953.

As Ben pointed out some years ago, my recollection of "I Love Lucy" was a
senior moment for this. There's no "I Love Lucy" "gaslight" cite in HDAS.

JL

On Mon, Jun 2, 2025 at 3:01 PM Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu> wrote:

> Thanks, John, for the mention of my research on "woke."  Subsequently I
> found a 1925 political use of "woke."
>
> Fred Shapiro
>
> ________________________________
> From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of
> Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> Sent: Monday, June 2, 2025 8:10 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 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
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society -
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