Closing in on "the whole nine yards"

[Nick Theodorakis]

"Fresh Air" (from NPR) will be broadcasting a story today about the etymology of "The Whole Nine Yards," see:

http://www.npr.org/2013/01/11/169140...-yards-of-what

Nick

[snopes]

Last week’s article about recent discoveries relating to the origins of the mysterious phrase “the whole nine yards” drew a huge number of online comments, most of them from people whose certainty about their own pet theories was matched only by their total lack of supporting evidence.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/20...rds-continued/

[Seaboe Muffinchucker]

Why do you suppose people find the answer "we don't know" so hard to accept in connection with this phrase? There are others with similarly obscure origins but no one seems to care that we don't know about them.

Seaboe

[Brad from Georgia]

Originally Posted by Seaboe Muffinchucker

Why do you suppose people find the answer "we don't know" so hard to accept in connection with this phrase? There are others with similarly obscure origins but no one seems to care that we don't know about them.

Seaboe

That is a puzzlement to me!

[Brad from Georgia]

Okay, I got it:

In the seventeenth century, a pirate led his crew when they attacked and boarded a British merchantman. There were sixteen men in the pirate crew; seven stayed aboard their barque whilst nine swung aboard the merchantman. The captain had told them all to scream at the British crewmen to terrify them.

It worked. The frightened merchant crew dropped their weapons, the pirates looted the ship and went back aboard the pirate vessel, and the captain congratulated his men: "Ahh, me hearties, we got us a fine pile o' booty. An' it's all due to your yellin'. As I told ye before, no merchant crew can resist the whole nine yarrrrs."

[musicgeek]

One more pun like that, and I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to stand closer to the rhino.

[Brad from Georgia]

Originally Posted by musicgeek

One more pun like that, and I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to stand closer to the rhino.

Not *choke* the rhino!

[musicgeek]

Which now sounds like a euphemism (and bragging, too!), thank you ever so much.

ETA:And really, now... isn't the proper construction: "Good Lord! *choke* Not the rhino!"?

[Furienna]

Originally Posted by GenYus234

I can't hold back any longer. Pluto was not discovered until well after Napolean's time, so it could not have been used to plot his future.

Ahhhhhhhh..........

Dang! I should have caught that myself! As a matter of fact, it seems like not even Neptune was properly discovered until 1846.