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The whole nine yards" or "the full nine yards" is a colloquial American English phrase meaning "everything, the whole lot" or, when used as an adjective, "all the way". [1] Its first usage was the punch line of an 1855 Indiana comedic short story titled "The Judge's Big Shirt".
Early appearance of "Bob's your uncle" in print, an advertisement in the Dundee Evening Telegraph on 19 June 1924 "Bob's your uncle" is an idiom commonly used in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries that means "and there it is", or "and there you have it", or "it's done".
The exact origin of the phrase is uncertain. [5] Its earliest (1685) appearance in print comes from a posthumously published collection of sermons by Scottish preacher James Durham: "Many profest Christians are like to foolish builders, who build by guess, and by rule of thumb (as we use to speak), and not by Square and Rule."
An exact phrase exists in Spanish, Cuando los chanchos vuelen, literally meaning "when pigs fly". An identical phrase, used to express impossibilities, exists in Romanian, Când o zbura porcul, literally meaning "When the pig shall fly"; an equivalent also implying an animal is La Paștele cailor, literally: "on horses' Easter".
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (New and Revised edition. 1981) states that the phrase is "perhaps a corruption of 'then eyne' (to the eyes)" The phrase may have originally been associated with the Nine Worthies or the nine Muses. A poem from a 17th century collection of works by John Rawlet contains the following lines: [3]
The phrase was coined at a time when most stores operated on the principle of caveat emptor, and could not always be trusted by customers. [5] [20] Writer Howard Vincent O'Brien described the more customer-friendly policy as "breaking down the barriers of mistrust which from time immemorial have existed between men in the exchange of goods". [21]
The word etymology is derived from the Ancient Greek word ἐτυμολογία (etumologíā), itself from ἔτυμον (étumon), meaning ' true sense or sense of a truth ', and the suffix -logia, denoting ' the study or logic of '. [3] [4] The etymon refers to the predicate (i.e. stem [5] or root [6]) from which a later word or morpheme ...
An adaptation of the Old English word atter meaning "poison", and closely related to the word adder for the venomous crossed viper. Lexicographers William and Mary Morris in Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins (1977) favour this derivation because "mad as a hatter" was known before hat making was a recognized trade. [1]