WOW!!!
THANKS! However, the below has about every possible etymology
EXCEPT the one I am betting on, i.e., the lenght of an ammo belt
used in the wing machine guns of American and English WWII
fighter planes:(
None the less, GREAT $H!T!
I thanks you, sincerely.
[Btw, could you spot me $100 till payday? Pay day, btw, is two
weeks after I find a stinking job:( ]
Best regards (anyway;-)
Mike
On Wed, 2 Aug 2000, Aleisha Saba wrote:
> 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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