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The whole 9 yards
- Thread starter dajowi
- Start date
Theohazard
New member
Nobody really knows where this phrase comes from. There is definitely not any kind of consensus that it comes from WWII.dajowi said:It is generally concluded that the phrase "the whole 9 yards) relates to the length of the belts used in machine guns on American aircraft during WWII
Here is an excerpt from a Snopes.com article:
The third of the three most widely circulated explanations of the term's origin attributes its "nine yards" aspect to the length of machine gun ammunition belts used in World War II:
[...]
While that theory appears plausible on the surface, there's a whole lot wrong with it. First, ammunition is most commonly measured in rounds and sometimes by weight, but not by the length of the belt that holds it. Second, "the whole nine yards" did not appear in print until approximately two decades after the time it was supposedly coined (World War II) and in wide enough use to have spread to others, gained further adherents, and rooted itself into the language. Folksy turns of phrase just don't operate that way: anything of strong enough appeal to become incorporated into common argot finds its way into print, often into news articles of the day.
Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia article on the phrase:
The earliest known example of this phrase is from 1907 in southern Indiana. It is related to the expression "the whole six yards," used around the same time in Kentucky and South Carolina. Both phrases are variations on the whole ball of wax, first recorded in the 1880s.[3] They are part of a family of expressions in which an odd-sounding item, such as enchilada, shooting match, shebang or hog, is substituted for "ball of wax."[3] The choice of the number nine may be related to the expression "to the nines" (to perfection).[nb 1]
Here's an excerpt from a NY Times article, where experts also refute the supposed WWII origin of the phrase:
Some lexicographers thought the evidence was creeping closer to a World War II-era origin, and possibly some connection to the military, though there was still no hard evidence for the popular ammunition-belt theory. Then, in August, Bonnie Taylor-Blake, a neuroscience researcher in North Carolina who had been searching for variants of the phrase via Google News Archive and Google Books for five years, posted a message on the e-mail list of the American Dialect Society noting a 1956 occurrence in an outdoors magazine called Kentucky Happy Hunting Ground, followed in September by a more startling twist: a 1921 headline from The Spartanburg Herald-Journal in South Carolina reading “The Whole Six Yards of It.”
The somewhat cryptic headline, atop a detailed account of a baseball game that did not use the phrase, initially caused some head scratching among the society’s members. One person asked whether the headline referred to the ball fields, or “yards,” of the six teams in the league discussed in the article.
But then Mr. Shapiro, searching in Chronicling America, a Library of Congress database of pre-1923 newspapers, found two 1912 articles in The Mount Vernon Signal in Kentucky promising to “give” or “tell” the “whole six yards” of a story. Ms. Taylor-Blake also found another instance from 1916, in the same paper.
The dating clearly refutes the popular ammunition-belt and concrete-mixer theories, Mr. Shapiro said, while the Kentucky focus suggests a probable “backwoods provenance.” As for the meaning of the phrase, he added, the slippage from six yards to nine — part of the same “numerical phrase inflation,” as he puts it, that turned “Cloud 7” to “Cloud 9” — suggests it doesn’t refer to anything in particular any more than, say, “the whole shebang” does.
Theohazard
New member
That myth was debunked in the links I posted above. From that Snopes article:jag2 said:I remember a concrete mixing truck was supposed to carry 9 cubic yards of cement. Builders would comment to the driver to make sure they got the "whole nine yards". Made sense to me but then I never drove a concrete truck.
Another popular theory posits the contents of a standard-size cement mixer as the phrase's origin. Concrete is vended by the cubic yard (one cubic yard equals 27 cubic feet), thus if a typical cement truck of the 1950s contained nine yards of this building material, it could fairly be said that a person who took delivery of a full truckload got "the whole nine yards." However, cement trucks of that era didn't carry that much product, as this cite from the August 1964 issue of Ready Mixed Concrete Magazine demonstrates: "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."
Per a reader's comment from The Word Detective by Evan Morris:
The problem with the phrase referring to fighter airplane ammo belts, either WWII or later, is that each model of fighter has different armament with varying capacities. For example in WWII:
British Spitfire: 300 rounds of .303 ammo per gun
P51 Mustang: 50 cal machine guns. The two inboard guns had 400 rounds each. The four outboard guns had 270 rounds.
P-38 Lightning: One 20mm Hispano A/N-M2 cannon with 150 rounds, and four .50 Browning M2 machineguns with 500 rounds each
Spitfire Mk.XIVE: Two Hispano cannon in the wing, with 120 rounds each. Two Browning .50 guns, with 250 rounds each.
So it is highly unlikely that few if any of them had a ammo belt measuring 9 yards.
Incidentally, the first known print use was referring to baseball and came in 1907 from The Mitchell Commercial, a newspaper in the small town of Mitchell, Indiana, in their 2 May 1907 edition:
“This afternoon at 2:30 will be called one of the baseball games that will be worth going a long way to see. The regular nine is going to play the business men as many innings as they can stand, but we can not promise the full nine yards.”
That of course pre-dates WWII. It is not evidence that the phrase was in widespread use at that time, or even that the phrase as used here has anything to do with the origin. I think it is good enough just to mark this one as “origin unknown”