Well - try this - always thought it meant that if you believed that, you
would believe anything - the whole nine yards......
Here goes:
Article
THE WHOLE NINE YARDS
But nine yards of what?
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 has anything going for it 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". That makes it clear that 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 has it that nine
yards is 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.
World Wide Words is copyright � Michael B Quinion, 1996-2000. All
rights reserved.
You can e-mail the author at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Page created 20 March 1999.
A. Saba
Dare To Call It Conspiracy
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