I visited my buddy this weekend, and they used his land in filming the Movie, 'The Whole Nine Yards'. So we were a talking about stuff, and when asked if I was still flyin, I told him I wasn't current, but that I do get my sudo-flyin fix in AH.
So after replying to his question how a 'virtual' game could satisfy my flying needs, which I assured him it couldn't, but comes damn close. I told him that up to 500 flyers from around the world battle in WW2 aircraft online at the same time, he freaked.
Then he says ,"That reminds me , remember the movie they filmed here"?. (The whole nine yards). I says"yah, so" He says, "when they were filming it, the saying, had something to do with WW2 aviation". I didn't know that.
So I looked into it, here's what I found. If someone has something better, please let me know, I'm about to lose a bet.
What Bruce said:
Whole nine yards
Comes from World War II fighter pilots, whose planes typically were
outfitted with enough machine-gun ammunition to extend 27 feet. If a pilot
expended all his ammunition on a mission, he would say, "I gave them the
whole nine yards".
World wide words:
Yet another explanation is that it was invented by fighter pilots in the Pacific during World War Two. It is said the .50 calibre machine gun ammunition belts in Supermarine Spitfires measured exactly 27 feet. If the pilots fired all their ammo at a target, they would say that it got “the whole nine yards”. A merit of this claim is that it would explain why the phrase only began to be recorded after the War.
Usenet archives:
A more recent assertion is that twenty-seven feet was the standard length of a machine-gun belt, and that firing off the entire round was shooting "the whole nine yards." This is sensible in a number of ways- -the military is often a source for expressions of this type; it makes perfect semantic sense; the phrasing is reasonable. Most machine-gun belts were less than twenty-seven feet, unfortunately, and of course this phrase is not found specifically associated with this theory until very recently.
Wikepedia:
The expression "The Whole Nine Yards" comes from World War II. The machine guns used to be fed their rounds in ribbons of 9 yard lengths. The go "the whole nine yards" meant that you went through the entire length of the ribbon. The expression has stuck since then, and refers to going the distance in a sequence of actions or events... in essence, to have gone through to a state of thorough completion.
