I always wondered about this quote and found out the other day what it meant. During WW2 there was a machine gun that had bullets that came in a belt that was 27 feet long (NINE YARDS). If the situation was bad they would say give them the whole nine yards, which has now come to mean everything you have... Anyone else have saying origins?

NUMS

A "red herring," as we use it today, is a situation devised to lead you a certain direction, perhaps in a story or a movie. It comes from the days when bloodhounds were trained to be trackers using their noses. When training them, the owners would drag a red herring, the fish, along the ground in order to give the dogs a strong scent to follow.

"Cash on the barrelhead" goes back to the old west when general stores used large barrels full of whatever lined up as a counter. They wouldn't hand over the merchandise until they had the cash on the barrelhead.

"Balls to the wall" doesn't refer to what you think, either. It comes from WWII, when certain types of airplanes had two throttle sticks. On the tops of theses sticks were two balls for gripping. When it was time to get moving quick, they would say, "Put the balls to the wall," referring to the balls of the throttle going forward into the wall of the cockpit dashboard.

"High-tailing" it refers to a horse when running at full speed will lift its tail high.

"Yellow journalism" was a term coined in the 1920s and 1930s referring to false or suspect reporting that was often found in the Hearst newspapers. Hearst papers were the first newspapers to syndicate a comic strip called, The Yellow Kid.

"You smell like a monkey" means that you actually have the odor of a lower primate, such as a chimpanzee.

OK, that's all I can remember right now. I made up the one about the monkeys.

Actually the origins of the "Whole Nine Yards" is uncertain. Speculation to its origins includes:

• The amount of dirt in a large burial plot
  
• The number of properties, or yards, in a standard city block in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Levittown (pick your city)
  
• The amount of cloth used in a burial shroud
  
• The capacity of coal trucks
  
• The number of yards on a square rigged sailing ship (yards being the horizontal poles that hold the sails), even though it was not uncommon for such ships to have 18 yards.

I recently saw a really interesting program about the origins of names for pieces of furniture! OK it sounds dull but it was really very interesting.

Rug is Swedish for dog. Originally a Swedish rug was made from animal fur and would lie on the floor like a dog.

A cupboard, obviously was originally a board for cups.

Wardrobe. Ward actually means to guard during the day (as opposed to a night watchman).

There were lots of others but as usual I've forgotten most of them!

There is, of course, a website dedicated to origins of phrases:

http://members.aol.com/MorelandC/Phrases.htm

In fact, according to Google there are over 150,000 such sites!

http://phrases.shu.ac.uk/meanings/ looks good.

This is specifically about the whole nine yards!

http://phrases.shu.ac.uk/meanings/411150.html