'The Whole Nine Yards' What does it mean?
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — The Whole Nine Yards
maamardli — 17 years ago(April 06, 2008 10:15 AM)
I saw the movie many times, and I like it it is very funny, but I did not understand the title, what does it mean? and when do you use it?
thanx -
hard_drive_6 — 17 years ago(April 10, 2008 01:13 PM)
it pretty much means the whole thing.
it comes from WWII, gun ships wold have 27 feet of ammo, if they fired it all, they did the whole thing or "the whole nine yards."
hope it helps
Garth Algar: Hey Mr. Donut Man, who's trying to kill ya? I don't know but they better not! -
lcopeland-1 — 17 years ago(May 10, 2008 04:41 PM)
This phrase also comes from the past during the 1800s. If a women of this time would have a dress made/or make a dress, to do it properly it would take 9 yards off of a bolt of fabic to make a "proper" dress. So the clerk would ask the customer "Do you want the whole nines yards"? If it was less than 9 yards the clerk knew they were skimping on the dress.
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Gunmaster45 — 17 years ago(September 20, 2008 02:29 PM)
Noooo, it came from WWI, since the British Vickers/Maxim had a 27 foot belt, and firing all nine yards was overkill. Straight from a professional historians mouth.
The Colt M1911A1 .45 ACP is the greatest handgun ever made. -
jejozi — 13 years ago(November 02, 2012 12:01 PM)
Since it only dates from the '60s, that explanation might be incorrect.
http://www.snopes.com/language/phrases/nineyards.asp
This will be the high point of my day; it's all downhill from here. -
sewalk927 — 17 years ago(October 20, 2008 12:03 AM)
The best summary of research into the origin of this phrase is from The Straight Dope. Forget most of what has been said here. The only one that might actually be true is the ready-mix concrete story. All the others have been pretty much proven false.
All that can be certain is that it means "the full amount". -
jejozi — 13 years ago(November 02, 2012 12:05 PM)
Concrete mixers don't carry yards but cubic yards. And they don't carry nine of those.
http://www.snopes.com/language/phrases/nineyards.asp
This will be the high point of my day; it's all downhill from here.
This will be the high point of my day; it's all downhill from here. -
joshzancan — 16 years ago(May 04, 2009 02:18 PM)
Cynthia uses it in the hotel room, talking about Jimmy wanting the whole ten million dollars. She mutters "The whole nine yards." I didn't catch it until the 3rd or 4th time I saw it.
"you're a handsome devil. what's your name?"
grosse pointe blank -
SquirePM — 16 years ago(June 25, 2009 10:14 AM)
I'm surprised to see so many false replies on this one, especially the ones based on 20th century explanations. The expression is centuries old, and professional etymologists will tell you its meaning and origin are shrouded in the mists of time and are unknown. They'll also give you this theory:
The big sailing ships of centuries ago had three masts, and each mast had three yardarms, or crossbars from which sails were suspended. In port all the sails were furled and tied to these yardarms. At sea, depending on sailing conditions such as the weather, the seas and the speed the captain desired, some of the sails were unfurled. When the captain wished to drive his ship the hardest, all nine sails were unfurled from all nine yardarms, which were called yards for short. So going the whole nine yards meant you were under full sail, going as fast as the ship could go.
But it's only the best one of several old theories. I'm afraid the 20th century explanations, while they may use accurate facts for a hook, are all johnny-come-latelys.
Pat Squire
P.S. The guy who calls the Colt .45 1911A1 the best pistol of all time is right! The yahoo who nominated the Polish Radom is either joshing us or his breast fills with national pride that clouds his judgment. And when Colt brought out the 1911A1 in 10mm, calling it the Delta Elite, pistols reached their absolute epitome of development. The 10mm cartridge, in factory hollow-point loading, delivers as much punch 200 yards downrange as the .45 does AT THE MUZZLE! -
Sidewindr — 10 years ago(June 13, 2015 10:32 PM)
@SquirePM: You're wrong as well.. The origins are unknown ..
As others have posted see snopes for detailed etymology
http://www.snopes.com/language/phrases/nineyards.asp
It is amazing how prolific urban legends etc. can become. -
jejozi — 13 years ago(November 02, 2012 12:00 PM)
It means the whole kit and kaboodle.. The origin is more or less unknown. It dates from the early 60s, so the WWII ammo belts (what I thought it came from) is out. Concrete trucks don't carry yards, they carry cubic yards, and, even then, they don't carry nine of them.
Here's what Snopes says about it:
http://www.snopes.com/language/phrases/nineyards.asp
This will be the high point of my day; it's all downhill from here. -
the_la_baker — 10 years ago(February 02, 2016 02:38 PM)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/27/books/the-whole-nine-yards-seeking-a-phrases-origin.html
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"The Whole Nine Yards About a Phrases Origin"
When people talk about the whole nine yards, just what are they talking about?
For decades the answer to that question has been the Bigfoot of word origins, chased around wild speculative corners by amateur word freaks, with exasperated lexicographers and debunkers of folk etymologies in hot pursuit.
Does the phrase derive from the length of ammunition belts in World War II aircraft? The contents of a standard concrete mixer? The amount of beer a British naval recruit was obligated to drink? Yardage in football? The length of fabric in a Scottish kilt (or sari, or kimono, or burial shroud)?
Type the phrase into Google and youre likely to get any of these answers, usually backed by nothing more than vaguely remembered conversations with someones Great-Uncle Ed. But now two researchers using high-powered database search tools have delivered a confident none of the above, supported by a surprise twist:
Before we were going the whole nine yards, it turns out, we were only going six.
The recent discovery of several instances of the whole six yards in newspapers from the 1910s four decades before the earliest known references to the whole nine yards opens a new window onto the most prominent etymological riddle of our time, said Fred Shapiro, a librarian at Yale Law School who announced the findings in next months issue of The Yale Alumni Magazine.
Other language experts agree about the import of the discovery. The phrase is interesting because its so mysterious, said Ben Zimmer, the executive producer of Visual Thesaurus.com and Vocabulary.com, who has written previously on the search for its origin. Its been a kind of Holy Grail.
Like the Holy Grail the whole nine yards has inspired both armchair mythologizing and years of hard and often fruitless searching through random books and miles of newspaper microfilm. Not that the expression is necessarily all that old. The first scholarly dating, in a 1986 supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, traced it to 1970. The Historical Dictionary of American Slang then pushed it back to 1967, with a citation from The Doom Pussy, Elaine Shepards novel about Air Force pilots in the Vietnam War.
Meanwhile popular obsession with the phrase was growing. Mr. Shapiro, editor of The Yale Book of Quotations, attributes the interest to William Safire, who was a political and language columnist for The New York Times, who died in 2009. In 1982 he made a public appeal for information about its origins on Larry Kings radio program. Mr. Safire went on to write no fewer than nine columns related to the phrase, including one chiding the White House chief of staff Donald T. Regan for referring to the whole seven yards.
There goes his credibility with me, Mr. Safire wrote, before confidently declaring that the expression referred to a fully loaded concrete truck, whose contents are typically measured in cubic yards.
But Mr. Safire was writing before searchable digital databases, which over the past decade have largely supplanted the painstaking work of poring over microfilm and given rise to a culture of ferociously competitive antedaters, often amateurs, eager to disprove various theories.
The first new break on the whole nine yards came in 2007, when Sam Clements, a coin dealer and avid word sleuth from Akron, Ohio, discovered it in a 1964 article in The Tucson Daily Citizen about space program slang. By 2009 two other researchers had pushed it back to 1962, when it appeared in a short story about a brush salesman and an article in a car magazine.
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 societys 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.