whole nine yards
My understanding of the origin of the phrase "whole nine yards" is from my grandmother, who said that it meant to buy a whole bolt of a particular fabric at a general store, where it was stored on...
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The difference between "the whole nine yards" and "acorn squash" is that no one tried to find antedatings of "acorn squash" before Popik came along and looked.Hundreds, if not thousands, have been...
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Baseball uses feet, not yards. The stadia in Canada do have meters in addition to feet on the outfield walls. Any referance to 9 in baseball would have to relate to either 9 men on a side, or 9...
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TWNY is often associated with American football, but not baseball. In football the canonical distance is ten yards and some suggest TWNY originated as a sarcastic reference to falling just short....
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For the Love of the Game-it's only redeeming value was Scully doing the play by play-he very rarely does that. "Waterworld" played on a flight-I felt like jumping out.
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The Whole Nine Yards starred Bruce Willis and, as Dave says, had nothing to do with baseball. It was about a mobster in th Witness Protection Program moving in next door to a dentist.Just to confuse...
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Having argued the drapery-scandal origin of TWNY, I can now show open-mindedness by arguing a hoop-skirt origin. By way of introduction, lets first look at MWO on:Main Entry: whoop-de-do Variant:...
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Something closer to home, cited in HDAS.Manly Wade Wellman, "Nine Yards of Other Cloth", a fantasy story from 1958.I have the 1964 anthology version: in "Who Fears the Devil?", p. 179: an evil...
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umm, yEah, was reading the entymologies (did i spell that right?) of the phrase, "the whole nine yards" and i just thought id put in what i know.what i heard was that in WW2, in the pacific theatre,...
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If you had read the entry on "the whole nine yards" you would have seen that this story is pretty conclusively debunked.
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I don't believe that the ammo-belt etymology has been convincingly debunked. In fact, I believe it is clearly the most likely of the conventional candidates ... although not by any means certain.I...
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There is some reason to believe that the phrase may be military, or more specifically air force, in origin, but that doesn't make the ammo story true. While some (but not all) early citations are in...
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>Third, ammo is never measured in yards or other linear measures. It is always measured in number of rounds (or in some modern beltless aircraft systems by weight). There simply are no usages of...
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A good objection ... but it seems to apply to ALL the conventional stories to some degreeWhich is why we skeptics don't believe any of them, and snort derisively at people who claim to Know The True...
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Finally, with all the books, letters, documentaries, etc. produced about WWII, if this had been a phrase associated with ammunition loads you would expect at least one quote like, "I gave the Zeke all...
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And it is possible that the first person to use the phrase had nothing specific in mind, and merely used the number "nine" and the word "yards" because they sounded cool. It also seems to me that...
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There are claims on the Internet of "whole nine yards" from pre-1960. My sometimes reliable correspondent has followed up a few, and has received e-mail claims of hearing the phrase as early as ca....
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As I understand it a bumbershoot is a very particular sort of umbrella-the word is a combination of umbrella and parachute and describes the appaparatus that doormen at snooty establishments use to...
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Heres another CANOE origin:chugalug a 'yard of ale', a long, thin drinking glass. New sailors in the British Navy, as part of their initiation rite, were required to make the rounds of nine certain...
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