One way or the other, the real birth of the expression was when somebody passed it along without caring what "nine yards" referred to. But it could also be that somebody just plucked the words out of the air one Tuesday morning. Of course there could be a real story behind the expression, even if it's no more than a family joke about the long scarves that Aunt Florence used to knit as Christmas presents. But they put the kibosh on the stories about World War II and the one about cement trucks, which hadn't been invented yet - though, actually, none of these stories was very plausible in the first place. True, the findings don't actually settle what if anything the phrase originally referred to. The unearthing of those early sources was deemed important enough to warrant a story in The New York Times, not an organ that ordinarily treats etymological discoveries as breaking news. That's still how the phrase goes in parts of the South, but it was inflated to "nine yards" when it caught on elsewhere, the same way the early 20th-century "cloud seven" was upgraded to our "cloud nine." Now they've discovered an even earlier version of the phrase, "the whole six yards," which was used in the rural South as early as 1912. Word-sleuths traced the modern use of "the whole nine yards" as far back as a 1956 article in a magazine called Kentucky Happy Hunting Ground. But with the vast historical collections of books and newspapers that are now online, etymology has joined the list of activities you can do in your pajamas. It used to be hard to debunk these tales, since the only way to track the expressions down was by rooting around in library stacks and newspaper morgues in search of a revealing early citation.
They're often shaky in their facts about ammunition belts or cement trucks, but they come with assurances that the information came firsthand from an old Naval gunnery instructor or a Scottish tailor.
One on cloud nine meaning full#
The Internet is full of just-so stories like these. Or it came from a joke about a prodigiously well-endowed Scotsman who gets his kilt caught in a door. Or it had to do with a fourth-down play in football. Or it was the amount of cloth in the queen's bridal train, or in the Shroud of Turin. Some people say it dates back to when square-riggers had three masts, each with three yards supporting the sails, so the whole nine yards meant the sails were fully set.Īnother popular story holds that it refers to the length of an ammunition belt on World War II fighters - when a pilot had exhausted his ammunition, he said he had shot off the whole nine yards. He thought the phrase originally referred to the capacity of a cement truck in cubic yards.
Where does the phrase "the whole nine yards" come from? In 1982, William Safire called that "one of the great etymological mysteries of our time." There are those who say the phrase "the whole nine yards" comes from a joke about a prodigiously well-endowed Scotsman who gets his kilt caught in a door.
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