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Sayings- The whole nine yards

Friday, 02 December 2011 04:27
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The whole nine yards

Every now and then I feel the urge to go back to the Holy Grail of etymology - 'the whole nine yards'. I was prompted to take another look at it this week by the unveiling of the British Library Newspaper Archive.

This gives online access to a vast store of British newspapers, which will eventually include the majority of all newspapers printed in Britain since the early 1700s.

Just the place to try a search for an early printed example of 'the whole nine yards' n'est-ce pas?

Well, yes and no.

If you aren't familiar with the search for the origin of that elusive expression, here's the story so far...

  • For reasons that aren't clear, 'the whole nine yards' provokes more speculative derivations than any other phrase.
  • Many people are convinced they know the origin but aren't able to provide documentary evidence to support their chosen belief.
  • The earliest known citation of the phrase in print is from 1962.
  • In May 1961, the American athlete Ralph Boston broke the world long jump record with a jump of 27 feet 1/2 inch. No one had previously jumped 27 feet.
  • This was big news at the time and surely cried out for this headline:

    "Boston jumps the whole nine yards"

    If the phrase was in circulation before 1961, it wasn't known to that most slang-aware troop, newspaper journalists, and no one came up with that line, which is missing from all newspaper archives.

  • The absence of the expression in print prior to the 1960s argues strongly against any of the supposed mediaeval, Victorian or even World War II origins.

  • The weight of circumstantial evidence is that the phrase originated in America in the early 1960s but it isn't known who coined the term.

    • Sadly, the new archive yielded no results.

     That's not altogether surprising, as it is reasonably certain that the phrase is of 20th century American origin.

    The British Library database did come up with a story from 1821 of a stagecoach toppling off a cliff and falling 'full nine yards', but that doesn't carry the current meaning of the phrase and appears to be a straightforward literal report.

    Nevertheless, the digitisation of old manuscripts provides etymologists with a gateway to sources that were previously inaccessible.

    The American academic Stephen Goranson recently found this piece in a newly digitised copy of Michigan's Voices: A Literary Quarterly & Arts Magazine, Fall 1962:

    ... real civilized living in the modern urban home - then the dog would catch on and go ki-yi-yi-ing from one to the other of the shouting pyjama clad participants - mad, mad, mad, the consequence of house, home, kids, respectability, status as a college professor and the whole nine yards, as a brush salesman who came by the house was fond of saying, ...

    Also in late 1962, this passage appeared in a letter to the editor in an issue of Car Life, also now available in online format:

    Your staff of testers cannot fairly appraise the Chevrolet Impala sedan, with all nine yards of goodies, against the Plymouth Savoy.

    The meanings of the word 'yard' are many and varied.

    We have linear, square or cubic yards, also yard-arms, steelyards etc.

    This is the source of the variability of the many guesses at the phrase's origin.

    These include:

  • The nine cubic yards capacity of US concrete trucks.
  •  Widely circulated, although clearly nonsense as even the largest concrete mixers were smaller than 9 cubic yards in the 1960s.
  • World War II aircraft. There are several aircraft-related theories:
  • The length of US bombers' bomb racks.
  • The length of the RAF Spitfire's machine gun bullet belts.
  • The length of ammunition belts in ground based anti-aircraft turrets, etc. 

  • The amount of material used in making top quality suits. Supporters of this theory sometimes relate it to 'dressed to the nines'.
  • The derivation is naval and the yards are shipyards.
  • Another naval version is that the yards are the spars of sailing ships.
  • The name for the spar that hold the sails is a yard. Large sailing ships had three masts, often with three yards on each. The theory goes that ships in battle can continue changing direction as new sails are unfurled.
  •  Only when the last sail, on the ninth yard, is used do the enemy know in which direction the ship is finally headed.

    • Despite the certainty of the proponents of each of these explanations, at best only one of them can be correct.

    The evidence argues against any of them being the origin of the phrase.

    What the above digitised documentary evidence actually points to is that the phrase in its earliest incarnations refers to a 'laundry list' of items.

    Speculation will of course continue until a definitive source for the phrase is found.

    I'm not holding my breath but, if an origin is found, I've no doubt that it will be as the result of a search of a digitised archive.

     

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