artbycassiday

Thursday, April 15, 2021

I did the full Monty today, the whole enchilada, the full nine yards, the whole kit and caboodle, on my walk. I'm guessing at least two miles. Monty, by the way, may refer to Sir Montague Burton, a tailor know for his three-piece suits, Chesterfield, Derbyshire in 1904. Customers would order the full Monty meaning thethree-piece suit: jacket, pants, and a vest. The phrase is also conneccted to a Spanish card game although there is no evidence of that and to Field Marshall Montgomery, a British General in WWII who liked to wear all his medals. This latter source is also unsubstantiated. "Boodle" comes from 17th cent. Dutch and means "crowd" as in "a crowd of people." Later it meant money. A Kit was a small basket to carry stuff. The Word Detective web site adds this: "Interestingly, there were several variants of “kit and caboodle” in use at during the same period, including “kit and boodle,” “kit and cargo” and the slightly mysterious “kit and biling” (“biling” being a regional pronunciation of “boiling,” originally “the whole boiling,” meaning an entire batch of soup or stew). But as weird as “kit and biling” is, English slang had already produced some admirably odd phrases meaning “all and everything,” including “top and tail” (1509), “prow and poop” (1561), and the Anglo-Indian term “the whole sub-cheese” (from the Hindi “sub,” all, plus “chiz,” things, also possibly the root of “big cheese”). The 19th century zeal for phrases meaning “everything” also produced “lock, stock and barrel,” a refreshingly lucid list of the important bits of a flintlock rifle." At any rate, I had a good walk and did my weights afterward, which by the way can be both singular and plural as in, I did my weights afterwards. Singular is more common in the American English; the plural form is more common British usage, Canada too. The full nine yards, or whole nine yards is a mystery. Its origin is unknown and has been described by Yale University librarian Fred R. Shapiro as "the most prominent etymological riddle of our time." Possible sources include a measure of fabric, a saling reference to yardarms, machine gun belts, the volume of a cement truck, among others. The phrase originally was the whole six yards. William Safire wrote extensively about the whole nine yards but ultimately judged the whle shebang as inclusive. Oh jeez, that's another idiom.

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