World Wide Words -- 20 Mar 99

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 136          Saturday 20 March 1999
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>From Michael Quinion                        Thornbury, Bristol, UK
Sent every Saturday to more than 4,500 subscribers in 85 countries
Web: <http://www.quinion.com/words/>   E-mail: <words at quinion.com>
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Contents
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1. Feedback.
2. Article: The whole nine yards.
3. In Brief: Therapeutic cloning.
4. Weird Words: Serendipity.
5. Q & A: Cat's mother, Pull (out) the plug.
6. Administration.


1. Feedback
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SURVEY. So far 1319 replies, a response rate of 29%, unheard of in
the history of surveys! I'll put out a special mailing soon with
results and feedback. Many thanks again for all your comments.

ISSUE HISTORY. Comments about missing issues suggest you may like
to be reminded that the only Saturdays on which this newsletter
has *not* been published since the start of last year are 9 May,
16 May, 29 August, and 21 December 1998 and 2 January 1999. Get
missing issues at <http://www.quinion.com/words/backissues.htm>.

Q&A. Panic over. Business as usual, except I shall be answering a
smaller proportion of questions than before, and focusing on those
which seem most interesting or intriguing. So, over to you ... but
do remember to send questions to <qa at quinion.com>.

BUNNY. Ana Maria Gallo from Bellingham in Washington state pointed
out another word for a rabbit's tail, which is 'fud'. That has no
connection with IBM's famous abbreviation FUD ("Fear, Uncertainty,
and Doubt"). It's a Scots dialect word which in modern times is a
vulgar expression for the nether regions (I put it that way so as
not to trigger the obscenity filters that exist on many systems).

PUMP AND DUMP. Patrick Nesbitt, a doctor from British Columbia,
wrote to say this expression is medical jargon for extracting,
storing or disposing of breast milk during times when it would be
unwise for a nursing mother to feed her baby, say when she is on
some kind of short-term medication that might contaminate it.


2. Article: The whole nine yards
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There are some queries that we answerers of questions on the story
of the English language get asked more often than others. "What is
the third word ending in 'gry'?" has come top of the list by a
good margin. But "Where does 'the whole nine yards' come from?"
runs it a close second.

If you're hoping for a definitive answer, you'd better buy a
crystal ball. I have to say straight away this is one of the great
unsolved mysteries of modern etymology, for which many seek the
truth and almost as many find explanations, but hardly anyone has
a clue. What we do know is that the phrase is recorded from the
1960s, is an Americanism (it's nothing like so well known in
Britain, for example), and has the meaning of "everything; all of
it; the whole lot; the works". But there are no leads anyone can
discover to a reasonable idea of where it came from.

What is most remarkable about the phrase is the number of attempts
that have been made to explain it. This may be because it's an odd
expression. But perhaps our need to make sense of this saying in
particular is because it came into existence only during the
lifetime of many people still with us, and so lacks the patina of
age that turns phrases into naturalised idioms that we accept
without question.

While looking into it, I've seen references to the size of a nun's
habit, the amount of material needed to make a man's three-piece
suit, the length of a maharajah's ceremonial sash, the capacity of
a West Virginia ore wagon, the volume of rubbish that would fill a
standard garbage truck, the length of a hangman's noose, how far
you would have to sprint during a jail break to get from the
cellblock to the outer wall, the length of a standard bolt of
cloth, the volume of a rich man's grave, or just possibly the
length of his shroud, the size of a soldier's pack, the length of
cloth needed for a Scottish "great kilt", or some distance
associated with sports or athletics, especially the game of
American football.

None of these have anything going for them except the unsung
inventiveness of compulsive explainers. For example, a man's suit
requires about five square yards of material; anyone who thinks a
soldier's pack could measure nine cubic yards is dimensionally
challenged; and I'm told it takes ten yards to earn a first down
in American football, not nine.

One particularly bizarre story that turns up more frequently than
any other is that it represents the capacity of a ready-mixed
cement truck, so that 'the whole nine yards' might be a reference
to a complete load. It does seem rather unlikely that a term from
such a specialist field would become so well known throughout
North America, but one or two writers are convinced this is the
true origin. However, the capacity of today's trucks vary a great
deal, and few of them can actually carry nine cubic yards of
concrete. Matthew Jetmore, a contributor to the alt.folklore.urban
newsgroup, unearthed evidence from the August 1964 issue of the
_Ready Mixed Concrete Magazine_ that this could not have been the
origin: "Whereas, just a few years ago, the 4.5 cubic yard mixer
was definitely the standard of the industry, the average
nationwide mixer size by 1962 had increased to 6.24 cubic yards,
with still no end in sight to the demand for increased payload".
So, at the time the expression was presumably coined the usual
size was only about half the nine (cubic) yards of the saying.

Another relates to the idea of 'yards' being the long spars on a
ship rather than units of measurement. The argument is that a
three-masted ship had three yards on each mast for the square
sails, making nine in all. So that a ship with all sail set would
be using 'the whole nine yards'. The biggest problem here is
dating - by the time the expression came into use, sailing ships
were long gone; even if the phrase were fifty years older than its
first certified appearance (unlikely, but not impossible), it
would still be right at the very end of the sailing-ship era, and
long after its heyday. Other problems are that big square-rigged
sailing ships commonly had more than nine yards and that the
expression ought in that case to be 'all nine yards' rather than
'the whole nine yards' (the same objection could be made about
other suggestions that involve numbers rather than areas or
volumes). Another attempt at relating the expression to sailing
ships says it's somehow related to the area of canvas, but a full-
rigged ship had vastly more than nine square yards of sail.

Yet another explanation is that it was invented by fighter pilots
in the Pacific during World War Two. It is said the .50 calibre
machine gun ammunition belts in Supermarine Spitfires measured
exactly 27 feet. If the pilots fired all their ammo at a target,
they would say that it got "the whole nine yards". A merit of this
claim is that it would explain why the phrase only began to be
recorded after the War.

Some writers argue that the number isn't a dimension of any kind:
Jonathon Green, in his _Cassell Dictionary of Slang_, suggests
that it's most likely to represent a use of 'nine' as a mystic
number, after the fashion of 'nine tailors', the 'nine muses', and
several other expressions; Jesse Sheidlower thinks that it may be
related in this way to the number in the equally odd expression
'dressed to the nines'.

What do I believe? I believe that, failing the discovery of the
lexicographical equivalent of the crock of gold at the end of the
rainbow, we are unlikely to find out the truth about this one.


3. In Brief: Therapeutic cloning
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Following all the recent fuss about the cloning of animals that
led to the idea that human beings might be cloned - an idea that
seems to have struck to the heart of people's atavistic impulses -
this term has been coined to describe a benign method of growing
bits of one's own body for organ and tissue replacement or repair.


4. Weird Words: Serendipity
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The ability to make unexpected and fortunate discoveries.

This word has been around for more than two centuries, but only
really began to be used much in the twentieth century, to the
extent that the adjective 'serendipitous' is not recorded before
the 1950s. Horace Walpole coined it in a letter he wrote to his
long-time diplomat friend Horace Mann in 1754. He told him that he
invented it in reference to the title of an old Persian fairy
story _The Three Princes of Serendip_, whose heroes regularly
discovered pleasant things that they weren't searching for. But
I'm told that if you read the story you will find that the princes
were actually well educated and intelligent men. Their good
fortune (which was a bit slap-dash: they got thrown in jail as
suspected camel thieves at one point) was based on careful
deduction, not chance. As the saying has it, "fortune favours the
prepared mind", just as discoveries today that are said to be
'serendipitous' are so often the result of experience and good
observation. The three princes came from a country the Persians
called 'Sarandib' but which we now know as Sri Lanka, or in
earlier times Ceylon. The Persian is a corruption of the Sanskrit
'Sinhaladvipa', "the island where lions dwell", hence the name
'Sinhala' or 'Sinhalese' for the most common Sri Lankan language.


5. Q & A
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[Send queries to <qa at quinion.com>. Messages will be acknowledged,
but I can't guarantee to reply, as time is so limited. If I can do
so, a response will appear both here and on the WWW Web site. Any
question sent to <words at quinion.com> will be moved over to Q&A!]
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Q. Can you tell me anything about the expression 'Who's she? The
cat's mother?' I've heard it used in a context in which you're
talking about a woman and referring to her as 'she' rather than by
name. [Jane Van de Ban; also from Richard Dury in Italy]

A. How it came into being, I really can't begin to discover. All I
can tell you is that it's first recorded about the end of the
nineteenth century (at least, the 'Oxford English Dictionary' has
citations from that period; Jonathon Green says in his _Cassell
Dictionary of Slang_ that it dates only from the 1950s in the form
of a direct reply to somebody asking rudely or intrusively "who
are you?"). In its older form, as you say, it was usually said to
a child who used 'she' to refer to some grown-up when this was
thought to be insufficiently polite.
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Q. I've long wondered whether the expression 'to pull out the
plug' refers to the sink or the electrical socket. Any ideas?
[Brenda Malkiel]

A. When we use the expression today, it must surely evoke a mental
image of the electrical rather than the water sense, which is
perhaps why we're now more likely to say 'pull the plug (on
someone)', leaving out the 'out'. When I first read your question,
that seemed to be the most likely origin, but then I remembered
that 'to pull the plug' was the expression that my mother used for
flushing the lavatory (this was in London in the 1940s). To flush
an old-style gravity feed water closet before the days of siphons
you did indeed pull out, or pull up, a plug that stoppered the
pipe from the cistern. The _Oxford English Dictionary_ confirms
that the phrase was first used in just that sense. The first
citation is from Florence Nightingale's _Notes on Nursing_ of
1859: "As well might you have a sewer under the room, or think
that in a water closet the plug need be pulled up but once a day",
and one from 1919 remarks on "A real Victorian W.C. with a pull up
plug". Another from 1873 refers to a plug in a sink basin. Though
there are citations referring to other senses, including the
figurative one, not a single one refers to electrical plugs.


6. Administration
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