The Whole Nine Yards, Continued ...

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.

A number of readers simply repeated old canards about the length of traditional saris (or Scottish kilts), the contents of cement trucks, and the quantity of sails on traditional masted ships. No one explained how any of these theories jibed with the recent discovery of a “whole six yards” variant in a Kentucky newspaper in the 1910s (some four decades before the appearance of “the whole nine yards”), or why, for example, an expression that derived from saris or kilts would be totally unknown in British and Indian sources.

True, one antique d ealer from Eugene, Ore., did call in to say she owned an old bolt of cloth that would settle the matter once and for all. But the spirit of the response was best summed up by Ray from Seattle who, after repeating the (now disproved) theory that the expression derives from the length of ammunition belts in World War II-era aircraft, declared: “That's my conviction - and I'm sticking to it!”

Some readers did try to inject a bit of hard textual evidence into the debate. Several mentioned “The Judge's Big Shirt,” a humorous anecdote that appeared in several newspapers in 1855 (and findable on Google Books), in which a seamstress charged with making three shirts mistakenly uses “the whole nine yards” of cloth to make one huge one instead.

But Fred Shapiro, the Yale Law School librarian who announced the recent discovery of the “six yard” variant, said via e-mail that this anecdote was well known to lexicographers, and was clearly unrelated to the figurative phrase that emerged later.

He was somewhat more intrigued by two occurrences in The Brooklyn Eagle, submitted via e-mail by Joseph Halpern, a lawyer in Denver. One, from 1873, jokingly describes the politician Samuel J. Tilden writing “a brief and pithy letter nine yards long.” Another, from 1902, poked fun at another politician who “disappointed the galleries with pithy speeches six yards long.”

Those instances, Mr. Shapiro said, “seem like they may have some relation to the expression ‘the whole nine yards,'” which in its earliest uses (including the “six yards” variant) referred to the full extent of a story or other information. “But probably what we have here is just a hyperbolic usage of the word ‘yard' (documented by the Oxford English Dictionary as far back as Chaucer) plus various numbers attached to it,” he added.

Mr. Shapiro said he had little faith that any discovery would sway people from their favorite folk etymology. And pop culture does have a way of blithely ignoring the latest scientific research if it gets in the way of a good story. This year's Oscar for faultiest etymology surely goes to “Silver Linings Playbook,” in which Bradley Cooper's character delivers a ringing monologue declaring that “O.K.” derives from Martin Van Buren's nickname, Old Kinderhook (he was born in Kinderhook, N.Y.).

Unfortunately, that explanation - along with ones involving the Choctaw word “okeh,” Andrew Jackson's bad spelling, and a biscuit-maker named Orin Kendall - was disproved nearly 50 years ago by the lexicographer Allen Walker Read, who established through extensive reading in newspapers that it was part of an 1830s fad for humorous abbreviations, in which “Oll Korrect” became “O.K.”