Third
Epistle to Edwin.
Sir,
- Your last “nine yards” would
be unworthy of notice, as it commences with a falsehood and ends with a lie . .
. . I will not attempt to follow you
through your “nine yards” in all its
serpentine windings, but confine myself to one or two points more, and compare.
Democratic
Banner (Louisiana, Missouri), December 4, 1850, page 1.
The casual, yet cryptic,
use of ‘nine yards’ in this newly unearthed reference[i] has
renewed speculation about the murky origins of the well-known idiom, ‘the whole
nine yards; the ‘holy grail’ of American etymology.[ii] Does this “nine yards” illuminate the origin
of “the whole nine yards”; is it consistent with other theories of the origins
of ‘the whole nine yards’; or is it a red herring?
Professor Gerald Cohen,
editor of the journal, Comments on
Etymology, reads “nine yards” here as a reference to the length of Edwin’s
most recent letter. I have other ideas.
If “nine yards” is a
length of cloth and a lie is “cut from whole cloth,” then “nine yards” in
reference to a letter that “commences with a falsehood and ends with a lie,”
might be a clever allusion to a “lie, cut from whole cloth.” Or is that too clever? Professor Cohen finds the reference too
subtle to be believable.
Several other
references to “nine yards” of cloth from the same period, however, suggest that
readers of the time may have understood “nine yards” to be a reference to a
piece of cloth. If so, the reference
would not have been as subtle then as it seems to a modern reader. In addition, the possible use of “nine yards”
to refer to the length of Edwin’s letter would itself have been subtle at the
time, perhaps too subtle; similar idiomatic use of lengths measured in yards in
reference to the undue length of speeches, letters, or other documents does not
appear elsewhere in print until more than twenty years later. And, in any case, it would have been odd for
Kennedy to harp on Edwin’s long-windedness; the Third Epistle, itself, is three
columns long – the same length as Edwin’s letter.
If the “nine yards” at
issue here is a reference to a piece of cloth, as other references from the
period suggest it may be, then it may be one more piece of evidence to bolster
the proposition that “the whole nine yards” is derived from a standard length
of fabric. If the “nine yards at issue
here is a reference to the length of Edwin’s letter, then we are left with
several questions; why “nine” yards, what was so long about Edwin’s letter, and
why was “nine yards” set apart in quotation marks and left unexplained?
Both readings are
problematic; but which one is true – and which is “cut from whole cloth?”
‘WHOLE NINE YARD’
THEORIES
The origin of “the
whole nine yards” (attested from as early as 1907) has long been uncertain,
resulting in various suggestions: the length of WWII aircraft ammunition belts,
the volume of a cement truck, and the length of material in a Scottish
kilt/Indian sari/Japanese kimono/Victorian dress/burial shroud/ silk
scarf. The ammunition belt and cement
truck theories are clearly incorrect; the idiom is older than both military
aircraft and large, mechanized dump trucks.
As for the various fabric-related theories, they encountered skepticism
due to a paucity of evidence, but that situation is now changing.
Recent
scholarship suggests the idiom may be based on standard, nine-yard lengths
of fabric that were commonly available for retail purchase during the decades
leading up to the first use of the idiom.[iii] The evidence that fabric was routinely sold
and used in standard, nine-yard lengths, on several continents, over the span
of several decades, may unite all of the various, specific fabric-related
‘whole nine yards’ theories into a sort
of grand, unified theory of ‘the whole nine yards.’
‘NINE YARDS’ IN THE
THIRD EPISTLE TO EDWIN
The Third Epistle to Edwin was one of a
series of five letters[iv]
by William K. Kennedy, the Mayor of Louisiana, Missouri, calling out city
councilman Edwin Draper for alleged lies and falsehoods made by Draper in an
anonymous letter published in another newspaper; “the Record of the 20th Sept., signed ‘Common Sense,’ alias ‘Old
Ball,’ alias Edwin Draper.” Draper’s
letter accused Mayor Kennedy of illegally exercising a mayoral veto to block
legislation related to road and bridge construction. Mayor Kennedy believed that the City Charter
gave him the veto power; Draper argued that the ‘original intent’ of the
‘framers’ of the Charter was to deny the mayor veto power. The language of the Charter was apparently
ambiguous on the subject.
The Louisiana City Charter
was drafted in 1849. Edwin Draper and
his attorney apparently took the lead in drafting the specific language of the
Charter; drawing primarily from the language of St. Louis, Missouri’s Charter. The final language was approved in committee,
approved in a public vote, and subsequently passed into law by the Missouri State
Legislature.
Edwin Draper claimed
that his original intent in drafting the charter was to deny the mayor veto
power. Mayor Kennedy, on the other hand,
who participated in the debate and passage of the charter, believed that the
language of the charter established the veto power, regardless of Draper’s
personal intent. He argued that Draper’s
purported intent was not made clear to the public during debate on the matter; and,
even if Draper personally intended to eliminate the veto power from the
Charter, his undisclosed intent was not binding on the voters who were unaware
of the intent, and did not share his understanding of the relevant portions of
the Charter when they approved the Charter.
The First Epistle enumerated five specific
‘falsehoods’ Edwin Draper made in his original anonymous letter. The Second
Epistle claims that Draper’s response to the First Epistle (apparently published in a different newspaper)
admitted to three of the five falsehoods in his response to the First Epistle. The Second
Epistle then lists at least one additional falsehood made by Draper in that
first response. The stage was set for
the use of ‘nine yards’ in the Third
Epistle.
MAKING SENSE OF ‘NINE
YARDS’
The Third Epistle to Edwin opens by
disparaging Draper’s ‘last “nine yards”’ as ‘beginning with a lie and ending
with a falsehood.’ Kennedy does not ‘attempt
to follow [Draper] through [his] “nine yards” in all its serpentine windings,
but confine[s] [himself] to one or two
points more, and compare[s];’ after which he exposes several more alleged
falsehoods. The ‘last “nine yards”’
referred to here may be Draper’s response to the Second Epistle (published in the same newspaper as the three Epistles[v]);
the response ran to three full columns of the paper.
At first blush, the use
of ‘nine yards’ to describe a lie appears unrelated to nine yards of
fabric. When read in light of another
idiom, however, it may be directly related to fabric. If a piece of cloth is ‘nine yards’ long, and
a lie is, ‘cut from whole cloth,’ then ‘nine yards’ may be a clever allusion to
a lie.
OED3 presents whole cloth, nn., item b:
‘fig.
or in fig. context, esp. in phr. cut (etc.) out of (the) whole cloth , used in
various senses;
now esp. (U.S. colloq. or slang) of a statement
wholly fabricated or false.’
OED3’s examples start at 1579, but the
ones pertaining to ‘a statement wholly fabricated or false’ begin later, viz.
1843:[vi]
The idiom ‘cut from
whole cloth’ was common and current in the 1850s (with slight variations, e.g.
‘made out of whole cloth’). A
representative sampling from the hundreds of uses of the idiom from the period
of the excerpt at issue, illustrate how the phrase was then used and
understood:
…it is a base
slander – a genuine whisky lie, made out of the “whole cloth”
[italics added]
in the Ohio Statesman office.
The Ohio Organ of the Temperance
Reform (Cincinnati Ohio), October 7, 1853.
Such is the
demand for this kind of news, that occurrences the most trivial are made to
appear as treasonable, the imagination of some knights of the quill are tasked
to the utmost to manufacture out of whole cloth [italics added]
tales of horror and bloodshed, so eager are they to minister to this depraved
taste that they are never at ease, unless forsooth, they are chronicling some
“awful accident,” some startling rumor, which they are anxious to scatter
broadcast through the land.
Edgefield Advertiser, April 19,
1848, p. 1.
Falsehood must
be manufactured out of whole cloth [italics added]…
Anti-Slavery Bugle (New Lisbon, Ohio), January 7, 1848,
p. 2.
Now, this is
simply a wanton, gratuitous falsehood – “a
lie of the whole cloth” [italics added].
Jeffersonian Republican (Stroudsburg,
Pennsylvania), September 7, 1848, p. 1.
That allusion he
has manufactured out of whole cloth
[italics added] and bears his lie direct he dare not deny it . . . .
The Democratic Pioneer (Upper Sandusky,
Ohio), November 2, 1849, p. 2.
It is now
generally understood that the romance so ingeniously gotten up . . . concerning
the Africanization of Cuba, is a story made out of whole cloth
[italics added].
Glasgow Weekly Times (Glasgow, Missouri),
November 24, 1853, p. 3:
Of course, the use of ‘nine
yards’ to refer to a lie ‘cut from whole cloth’ would only make sense if ‘nine
yards’ were a commonly understood reference to a length of cloth. As it turns out, the phrase, ‘nine yards,’ does
appear to have been a commonly understood reference to a length of cloth during
the same period.
There were several
‘viral’ (at least by mid-19th century standards) jokes or anecdotes in
circulation during the 1840s and 1850s in which ‘nine yards’ was used in clear
reference to a length of material. In
some instances, the phrase, ‘nine yards [of some particular material])’ was
used figuratively, to refer to the woman wearing the material:
Superwoman
Weaves “Nine Yards”:
From the Charlotte N. C. Journal:
Beat
this who can. – “The hand of the diligent maketh rich.” -A few days ago, a lady living on the Banks
of the Catawba River, wove nine yards of cloth
[italics added], after which, before she went to bed, she spun four cuts of
yarn, and the next morning she had twin children (her first) and doing well.
Edgefield
Advertiser (Edgefield, South Carolina), March 19, 1840, page
2.[vii]
“Nine
Yards” of Cloth is a Woman:
Several anecdotes
circulated from 1853 and into 1854, in which ‘nine yards’ of some specific
cloth referred to a woman wearing nine yards of cloth. In some cases, the material was delaine (a form of Merino wool);
in others, calico:
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 21, 1853,
page 3.
Courting. – One of the most
delicate avocations that some young men have, is when they have made up their
mind that nine yards of calico
[italics added] is an essential and necessary requirement to their happiness
and comfort in this mundane sphere.
While to others it is a second nature, born in the animal, and they
engage in the pleasing task as if by instinct.
To them there is something in the idea of “speaking your mind” to a
female that causes an indescribable thrill of delightful anticipations. So at least we are informed by different
persons, and “what is in every body’s mouth be true.”
DeLaine
and Love. – The local of the Albany Transcript states that no man under
thirty-five can sit beside nine yards of delaine [italics added] without
becoming afflicted with the palpitation of the heart.
The
Ohio Union (Ashland, Ohio), May 25, 1853, page 4.[viii] Even Mark Twain approved of the joke; a seventeen-year-old
Samuel Clemens used the item in one of his first columns as sub-editor of the Hannibal Daily Journal.[ix]
‘The
best “mixture” for a sick heart is nine yards of calico
[italics added], fine broadcloth, four armsful of humanity, a parson’s
certificate of matrimony, a pair of canary birds and a bundle of green-house
hollyhocks. People disposed to doubt the
recipe should get a box.’
Nebraska
Palladium (Bellevieu City, Nebraska), November 15, 1854, page
1.[x]
The
experiences of our youth strengthens the impression that there’s more real
enjoyment in one quiet evening with nine yards of calico [italics
added], than in three ten-strikes, eleven gin-slings, four plates of
oysters, five gates taken off the hinges, seven signs pulled down, two hours’
sleep and a headache the next forenoon.
The
Opelousas Courier (Opelousas, Louisiana), March 18, 1854,
p. 2.
The
Knoxville papers announce the name of Col. Samuel R. Rodgers . . . as a
candidate for the office of Chancellor . . . .
But we have an insuperable objection to him . . . . He is an
incorrigible old bachelor – one who has toddled along through life, solitary
and alone, without having made his mark upon society, or done any thing for his
country or posterity. . . . Nothing
short of an immediate conjunction with nine yards of calico
[italics added] would do the Col. Any good if we lived in his district.
The
Athens Post (Athens, Tennessee), April 28, 1854, p.
2.
Muggins,
in relating his experience of the pleasures, vanities, and vexations of life,
says there is more real, unalloyed enjoyment in one quiet evening with
nine yards of calico [italics added] than any other institution he
ever met with. A most sensible man is
Muggins.
The
Athens Post (Athens, Tennessee), March 17, 1854, page
2.
Modern
girls are easily made. – Nine yards of calico [italics added], several curls,
a pink saucer, a pair of flesh colored gloves, a bottle of cologne, three
adjectives, and a tattling tongue, are a full complement.
Fayetteville
Observer (Tennessee), January 12, 1854, page 4.
LENGTH OF EDWIN’S
LETTER?
Another possible
reading of ‘nine yards’ in Kennedy’s Third
Epistle to Edwin, is as an exaggerated description of Draper’s earlier
letter. I have seen similar imagery used
elsewhere, but none earlier than 1872. Early
examples of the construction include:
Woodhull’s letter of acceptance is a
model of brevity only three yards long. (1872);[xi]
In addition, there was a row of
charming subpoenas . . . ending in a gorgeous old speech about four yards long.
(1873);[xii]
A North Carolina investor writes a
letter nearly a yard long. (1880);[xiii]
Mr. Ker should go into retirement until
he learns that a speech may be a thousand yards long and yet not be a great
one.
(1883);[xiv]
In his letter of acceptance, which is
four yards long… (1884);[xv]
I could tell him so to his face, if his
prayers were three yards long. (1886);[xvi]
It has a greater effect than a speech a
yard long. (1888).[xvii]
All of these early instances
refer to something being some number of ‘yards long.’ It seems unlikely to me that ‘nine yards’
standing alone, without ‘yards long,’ would have been idiomatic more than
twenty years earlier, in 1850, at a time when no similar responses have been
found.
CONCLUSION
All of William
Kennedy’s Epistles expressly address
Edwin Draper’s various enumerated falsehoods.
If ‘nine yards’ is understood as a reference to cloth – and therefore
‘whole cloth’ – and therefore a falsehood, the expression is consistent with
the subject of each of the Epistles.
None of William Kennedy’s
Epistles, apart from the possible
‘nine yards’ reference, address or complain about the undue length of Edwin
Draper’s letters. Curiously, the Third Epistle itself is the same length
as the letter to which it responds. If
‘nine yards’ were understood as a reference to the undue length of Edwin
Draper’s letter or letters, it would not be consistent with the subject matter
of any of the Epistles; and would
also smack a bit of “the pot calling the kettle black.”
The use of ‘nine yards’
to refer to a lie may not have been as subtle in 1850 as it seems now. It would have been consistent with other
contemporary use of ‘nine yards’ as a reference to fabric or to a woman wearing
fabric. If ‘nine yards’ were understood
as an allusion to fabric, it seems plausible that it may have been intended as
a reference to the idiom, ‘cut from whole cloth,’ which was common and
idiomatic at the time.
Using lengths measured
in yards to refer to the undue length of speeches, letters, or other documents, does not appear to have been common or idiomatic in 1850; at least the printed record (as far as I can tell) does not reveal it.
Such references first appear after 1870; and even then, they refer to
something as, “[so-many] yards long;” not, “[so-many] yards,” standing alone. The possible use of ‘nine yards,’ set apart in
quotation marks and without explanation, to refer to the length of Edwin’s letter
would have been at least as subtle as using it as a reference to a length of fabric
implicitly cut from whole cloth
Although it cannot be
said with certainty, that ‘nine yards’ was a subtle allusion to nine yards of
‘whole cloth,’ reading the phrase in that light makes an otherwise opaque
allusion clear.
UPDATE: October 16, 2015
When I first posted this piece, I was unable to find examples of idiomatic use of "so-many yards long" to describe lengthy pieces of writing. However, an item in the October 2015 edition of Comments on Etymology (Volume 45, Number 1) alerted me to the existence of "petitions" described as four or six "yards long" from 1847.
I was aware that such references might undercut the argument made above, which was premised, in part, on the fact that I had not found any examples of the idiomatic use of lengths, given in yards, to describe lengthy letters, poems, prayers, or speeches. I had not noticed the yards-long petitions; so I figured I should check them out. What I found, however, was that these early yards-long petitions may not be as relevant to a lengthy letter as they first seem. In every case of yards-long petitions that I could find before 1870 (searching for "yards long" and "yards, long and petition" within ten words of each other) the length of the "petition" was used to emphasize the number of people who signed the petition; not the length of the underlying text.
Here are the eight earliest examples I found:
Mr. Clay presented a petition (several yards long,) signed by almost all the business men of St. Louis, for a National Bank.
The Madisonian (Washington DC), June 19, 1841, page 3.
Mr. Kennedy of Maryland presented a petition 56 yards long, signed by NINE THOUSAND and NINETY FOUR [(emphasis in original)] citizens of Baltimore . . . .
Rutland (Vermont) Herald, April 26, 1842, page 3.
The Temperance people of the city of New York, made a grand movement last week, and secured the signatures of over twenty-five thousand persons [(Emphasis in the original)] to a petition . . . . The Temperance petition was two hundred and eighty-seven yards long [(Emphasis in the original)].
Jeffersonian Republican (Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania), April 3, 1845, page 2.
Was it true that no petitions had been offered praying the interference of Congress in the manner proposed by the bill? Why, he begged leave to exhibit that petition - [unrolling an immense scroll containing some hundreds of names.] He supposed that the petition was about four yards long. [A laugh.] There was another some six yards long - and another - and another - being altogether over a thousand signatures. [(Note: The bracketed portions appeared in the original)]
The Daily Union (Washington DC), January 21, 1847, page 2.
Mr. Mangum presented a petition, which, he said, he was informed on most respectable authority was signed by a large number of the members of the bar . . . . The subject came to them in an imposing form, [the petition was about four yards long,] and he hoped that it would receive the consideration of the Judiciary Committee. [(Note: The bracketed portion appeared in the original)]
The Republic (Washington DC), May 15, 1850, page 2.
Mr. Chandler, by leave, presented a petition from citizens of Philadelphia, which he said was seven yards long, in favor of the enactment of the homestead bill . . . .
The Daily Union (Washington DC), April 25, 1852, page 2.
Mr. Jacobs. - I have in my possession a petition five yards long from Baltimore mechanics, whose business has been injured by free-negro competition.
The Daily Exchange (Baltimore, Maryland), February 15, 1860.
The petition is about a hundred yards long, says the Traveller; is a foot in diameter when rolled up, and contains about 14,000 names.
Burlington (Vermont) Free Press, February 1, 1861, page 1.
In every case, the primary emphasis was on the length as indicative of popular support; not indicative of how long the underlying text was. Granted, two of them do not specifically describe the large numbers of signors; but in each, the suggestion of wide support seems implicit ("citizens of Philadelphia;" "Baltimore mechanics"). I have still not seen any pre-1870 examples of the idiomatic use of yards-long lengths to describe the undue length of letters, prayers, poems, speeches or any other document.
And, again, every one of these examples uses the expression, "yards long" - none of them refer to "(some-number of) yards," standing alone; as was the case in the Third Epistle to Edwin. The absence of regular use of "nine" or "six" in conjunction with the lengths of petitions may also lessen any presumed relevance of the usage to the idiom, "the whole nine yards."
None of this is proof, of course, that "nine yards" in the Third Epistle to Edwin was NOT a reference to the length of Edwin's earlier letter; but it at least suggests that references to petitions so-many yards long do not necessarily suggest that "nine yards" (as used in the Epistle) would have been understood as a reference to the length of the letter.
At the very least, the meaning is ambiguous. But the suggestion I made above, based on documented idiomatic use of "nine yards" to refer to lengths of cloth (or by extension to women wearing nine yards of cloth, and perhaps (?) to lies "cut from whole cloth"), is not necessarily weakened by the early yards-long petition references.
[i]
This item, first noticed by Richard Bucci, an editor for the Mark Twain Project
at the University of California, Berkeley, was brought to the attention of the
American Dialect Society by Richard Fred Shapiro, Editor of the Yale Book of
Quotations, in a post on the American Dialect Society’s Listserv message board
(ADS-L), dated April 27, 2015.
[ii]
Jennifer Schuessler, The Whole Nine Yards
About a Phrase, The New York Times online, Books, December 26, 2012 (quoting Ben Zimmer).
[iii] Peter
Reitan, Origin of The Whole Three/Six/Nine Yards: The Sale of Cloth in
Multiples of Threes was Common in the 1800s and Early 1900s, Comments on Etymology, Volume 44,
January 2015; Nine
Yards to the Dollar – the History and Etymology of “The Whole Nine Yards, Early
Sports ‘n’ Pop-Culture History Blog, February 9, 2011 (http://esnpc.blogspot.com/2015/02/nine-yards-to-dollar-history-and.html).
[iv] Democratic Banner (Louisiana, Missouri),
September 23, 1850, page 3 (Introduction
to the Epistles to Edwin); Democratic Banner (Louisiana, Missouri),
October 2, 1850, page 2 (First Epistle to
Edwin); Democratic Banner
(Louisiana, Missouri), November 6, 1850, page 1 (Second Epistle to Edwin); Democratic
Banner (Louisiana, Missouri), December 4, 1850, page 1 (Third Epistle to Edwin); Democratic Banner (Louisiana, Missouri),
January 20, 1851, page 3 (A Sequel to the
Three Epistles to Edwin).
[v] Democratic Banner (Louisiana, Missouri),
November 18, 1850, page 2.
[vi]
The expression dates to at least 1819: see, for example, Daniel Parker, Proscription Delineated, Hudson, New
York, Published for the Author, 1819, page 123 (“I informed Mr. Beach the story
was entirely new to me, and I knew not from what it could be framed. . . . .
[T]he story was framed out of whole cloth.”
(Italics in original)); Universalist
Magazine (Boston, Massachusetts), Volume 9, Number 46, May 3, 1828, page
181 (“Do our religious opponents, by inventing falsehoods “out of whole cloth,”
and circulating them with an industry that would become a better cause, think
by such means to convince us and the world that they are Christians?”).
[vii]
See also, The Columbia Democrat
(Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania), April 4, 1840, page 3; Salt River Journal (Bowling Green, Missouri), May 9, 1840, page 4
(Bowling Green, Missouri is very close to Louisiana, Missouri).
[viii]
See also, The Nashville Union
(Tennessee), May 17, 1853, page 2; Spirit
of the Times (Ironton, Ohio), May 17, 1853, page 2; Hannibal Journal (Hannibal, Missouri), May 26, 1853, page 2; Wilmington Journal (Wilmington, North
Carolina), August 12, 1853, page 4.
[ix]
Minnie M. Brashear, Mark Twain: Son of
Missouri, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1834, page 131
(citing the Hannibal Daily Journal,
May 23, 1853.
[x]
See also, Plymouth Advertiser (Plymouth,
Ohio), December 8, 1854, page 4.
[xi] The Donaldsonville Chief
(Donaldsonville, Louisiana), July 6, 1872, page 1.
[xii] The Pulaski Citizen (Tennessee), January
23, 1873, page 3.
[xiii]
The Wellington Enterprise, February
4, 1880, page 4.
[xiv] The Evening Critic (Washington DC), May
10, 1883, page 4.
[xv] The Hocking Sentinel (Logan, Ohio), July
24, 1884, page 2.
[xvi] Sacramento Daily Record-Union
(California), January 1, 1886, page 4.
[xvii]
The Emporia Weekly News (Emporia,
Kansas), September 20, 1888, page 2.
