Interesting... as the other explanations don't seem to work...

Cruising Sailors Forum Archive

In Response To: "The whole nine yards." ()

I was famililar with the cement truck and machine gun belt variants of the expression... but somehow these have never really had strong support, just guesses. And apparently anyone's guess is as good as the others.

The expression has been 9 yards for as long as I've known it, so I wonder about the "any number" replacement.

Messages In This Thread

"The whole nine yards."
- Just saw a special....
  - That matches what I read somewhere.
    - That's the correct answer.
- Interesting... as the other explanations don't seem to work...
- Snopes' pooh-poohs
- I've always thought is was a sailing reference
  - The use of that reference just wasn't contemporaneous?
    - It sounds like the term didn't come into popular use until after the 1950s
      - It's boggled a lot of minds beyond ours. ;^))))
  - Don't think so..
    - Some did, some didn't

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