Transcript of AE 1209 - Expression: The Whole Nine Yards

G'day, you mob and welcome to Aussie English! I am your host, Pete, and my objective here is to teach you guys the English spoken Down Under. So whether you want to sound like a fair dinkum Aussie, or you just want to understand what the flippin' hell we're on about when we're having a yarn, you've come to the right place. So sit back, grab a cuppa and enjoy Aussie English. Let's go!

Oh, g'day, you mob! How's it going? Welcome to this episode of Aussie English. The number one place for anyone and everyone wanting to learn Australian English. Guys, I hope you are having an amazing week. It is another Wednesday when I am recording this episode and I am kids-free. They are at Day-care, which is always good, when I get a bit of a break. I had them all yesterday.

And yesterday was actually my birthday! So yeah, it was a fun little birthday, sort of chilled at home. Hanging out with the kids and getting up to no good, I guess. We went for a bit of a stroll with the kids on their little bikes and scooters and stuff. So that was good fun. But yeah, overall it was pretty, pretty chilled. Pretty relaxed.

Anyway, guys, before we get into today's episode, don't forget! If you want the premium podcast content, you want access to the transcripts, the Premium podcast player, the bonus episodes, everything like that. Join up to the Premium Podcast membership. You can do so at www.AussieEnglish.com.au/podcast. Go check that out.

So let's jump straight into the Q&A today. I have a question here from @lvcoronadob on Instagram and they ask, "Can you teach me how to pronounce the word 'definitely'?" Definitely! So. Definitely is spelt D E F I N I T E L Y Definitely.

If I articulate this word, if I enunciate very, very clearly, I would say de-fi-nite-ly. De-fi-nite-ly. So you may notice certain syllables are emphasised and other ones are not, right. So where is the stress? If I say the word 'de-fi-nite-ly, 'de-fi-nite-ly. It's on the first syllable. 'de-finitely. The vowel sound is /ɛ/ /dɛ/ /dɛ/ /dɛ/. 'dɛ-finitely. 'dɛ-finitely.

Now the next two syllables are not stressed. They're unstressed. So they get the schwa sound. So you're not going to hear the I in either of those syllables pronounced as /eh/, /ee/ or /I/. You're going to hear it as /ə/ /'dɛ.fə.nət.ly/ /'dɛ.fə.nət.ly/ /'dɛ.fə.nət.ly/ /'dɛ.fə.nət.ly/ /'dɛ.fə.nət.ly/ So they get the schwa /ə/ vowel sound.

And then lastly, you're going to hear /ee/ the long vowel sound E for that Y at the end of the word. /'dɛ.fə.nət.lee/ /'dɛ.fə.nət.lee/ /'dɛ.fə.nət.lee/ /'dɛ.fə.nət.lee/

So with these longer words, guys. The best way to work out how to pronounce them, I usually suggest, obviously learning the international phonetic alphabet. Those are those weird symbols, many of which are in the English alphabet.

But you'll see them in dictionaries. Usually below the word, near the definition. And they show you how to pronounce the word. And importantly here, with longer words like this, they will show you where the primary and secondary stress on the word is, if it is more than one syllable.

So in the case of "definitely", it would definitely show you that the stress, the primary stress is on the first syllable. 'De-finitely, 'de-finitely, 'de-finitely.

Now, the last thing I would say here is that you can hear people sometimes drop one of the syllables in this word. So they might say 'definitely'; instead of /de.fi.nite.ly/, they'll say /def.nite.ly/.

So they ditch the second syllable. They turn it from four syllables into three. "Oh, def'nitely". "Yeah, def'nitely." "I'll def'nitely be there", "def'nitely be there", right? So it's kind of like I think we do it with other words, like "probably" you'll hear /prob'bly/. That's a good one. I'm trying to think of some other ones off the top of my head. There's definitely a lot of those long- did I say there 'definitely'? Yeah, I said it with all the syllables.

There's definitely a lot of those longer words where we turf one of the, the syllables. What's another one? "Laboratory". /lab'rat'ry/ Yeah, that's another one.

You just have to practice these guys and guess. Yeah. Again, another plug for my course, The Australian Pronunciation Course. If you want to nail understanding the international phonetic alphabet, how to use it, you want to learn how to pronounce things.

All the vowels, all the consonants in Australian English with an Aussie accent. Then go to www.AussieEnglish.com.au/apc and sign up for the Australian Pronunciation Course. All right, let's get into today's joke.

So today's expression was "the whole nine yards" and I couldn't really work out how to connect this with the joke, so I ended up finding one about convicts and criminals. Okay, so hopefully you'll enjoy this joke. Okay. Are you ready?

It's not a, it's sort of question answer one. It's more of a sort of short story. Okay, so here we go.

"I travelled to Australia the other week and I was passing through immigration. And they said to me, "Do you have a criminal record?" And I replied, "I didn't realise that it was still a requirement to get in here!"

Did you get it. So the person's obviously going through the airport, they're going through customs or Immigration or whatever it is. And the person is saying, you know, they're ticking off all the boxes on the form and they asking that mandatory kind of question, 'Do you have a criminal record?', right? And the person's replying, 'I didn't realise that it was still required' or 'it was still a requirement to get into Australia', right? So the joke here is that the person at the airport is asking if they have a criminal record because if they've committed a crime, you know, they're not allowed into the country.

I don't think that's the case in Australia. I think it might be a US thing, an American thing. But anyway, that's not the point. And the person answering the question is suggesting that the person asking it, is asking if they are a convict, from back in the day, right.

It's a reference to our convict history where between the years 1788 and 1868, we had something like 162,000 convicts brought to Australia from abroad, right. Mostly from the UK. And so to get to Australia, for the most part, you had to be a criminal, right? That's the kind of joke there.

So, "I travelled to Australia the other week and I was passing through immigration and they said to me, "Do you have a criminal record?" I replied, "I didn't realise that it was still a requirement to get in here!"

Uh, anyway, let's get into today's expression and break down the different words in it. So, "the whole nine yards". "The whole nine yards". I wonder if you've heard this expression before and understand how to use it. "The whole nine yards".

So, the words. "The". You'll know "the" or "the". So this is the definite article. Definite. Definite. It's definitely the definite article, the specific thing, right. So we use this when talking about specific nouns. So, "This is 'the' car that hit me when I was riding 'the' bike." Right. "'The' chocolate you have in your hand is my favourite type of chocolate." "'The' chocolate."

"Whole." So whole here is spelled W H O L E and it means the entire thing. All of something. Everything. So, "I watched the 'whole' movie." "I ate the 'whole' pizza."

"Nine." Nine is the number that is after eight, and before ten, right? Nine. Three times three. "I watched 'nine' movies in a row." "I ate 'nine' pizzas in a row. And then vomited everywhere." A yard.

"A yard" is a unit of linear measurement, which is equal to three feet. So it is about 91cm, a little shorter than one metre in the metric system. So yeah, a 'yard'. But most frequently you'll hear the word yard in English being used to mean a piece of uncultivated ground adjoining a building, which is a fancy way of saying your garden, right?

So I've got a backyard, I've got a frontyard, I sort of have a yard to the side of my house. It's the area where I have land outside my house that, you know, the kids play in the yard, right. Yard. But yes, it can also be a unit of measurement.

So "the whole nine yards", you might often hear this as "to go the whole nine yards", but "the whole nine yards" itself just means everything. The entire thing, everything that is required, the whole the way, the whole journey, everything, "the whole nine yards".

And if you go "the whole nine yards", this would be to do everything imaginable. So I was trying to look into the origin of this expression, and I think I'd been watching Time team or one of these documentaries from the UK with I think it's Tony Robinson. He was the the guy running the doco and he was mentioning that this expression originally came from World War Two. But when I did a bit of digging, I found that there's actually no consensus on where it originally comes from, and it could be multiple different places. It could be related to length of fabric that was sold to people, nine yards of fabric. It could be related to different sports, in particular American football, where they run, I guess, nine yards or ten yards, to the 10th yard post, or whatever it is. I don't know my American football that well.

But the interesting one that Tony Robinson mentioned in the doco was the one about World War Two. So I got this from Wikipedia and I thought I would read it to you guys.

"One explanation is that World War Two aircraft, machine gun belts were nine yards long. There are many versions of this explanation with variations regarding type of plane, nationality of gunner and geographic area and alternative weapon in the ammunition belt for the British Vickers machine gun invented and adopted by the British Army before World War One, the standard belt for this gun held 250 rounds of ammunition and was approximately 20ft in length."

"However, the Vickers gun, as fitted to aircraft during the First World War, usually had ammunition containers capable of accommodating linked belts of 350 to 400 rounds. The average length of such a belt being about nine yards. And it was thought that this may be the origin of the phrase."

So the idea here, guys, would be that you would put the nine-yard belt into a plane, the plane would fly off and it would use those bullets. It would shoot all of those bullets at the enemy. And if the plane was to fly back and had no bullets left, it was said "to have given the enemy the whole nine yards", right. The whole nine yards of the ammunition belt.

So there you go. That's where it potentially comes from, "the whole nine yards", everything.

So let's go through three examples of how I would use this expression in day to day English. So example number one. My wife and the kids birthdays are great examples. So at the moment, my wife loves going kind of a bit bonkers, a bit nuts, celebrating the kids birthdays, kind of organising everything. She just goes all out, right? She does everything. She buys balloons, lollies, decorations, cupcakes.

I think Joey had, my daughter Joey, Joanna, had a dinosaur birthday this year in March. She had, like stickers of dinosaur footprints on the ground. There was a dinosaur birthday cake. It was just the whole kit and caboodle, right? It was everything. My wife just threw everything in the kitchen sink at making my daughter's birthday as cool as possible.

She went 'the whole nine yards'. She did everything she could think of. She went nuts. She went a little crazy. She did loads. She 'went the whole nine yards'.

Example number two, imagine you are at high school and your mate wants to run for school president in year 12. So in Australia, this happens I think in pretty much every single high school where year 12 is the final year for students at high school before they finish or go to university or whatever. And usually, at least in all the schools that I knew of, there would be school captains or school presidents. This would be a boy and a girl that would be voted by other students to become the presidents or the captains of the school.

So you want to support your mate. You know, you've got a friend who wants to run for president for some weird reason. I don't know why you would ever want to do that. At least that's how I felt when I was at high school. And you are going to be with him for 'the whole nine yards'. You're going to be with him the whole way for the entire thing. You're going to support him as much as possible. You are going to be with him for 'the whole nine yards'.

So example number three. This could be literal, literal as well as figurative, right? So my grandfather, my dad's dad was a fighter pilot in the Second World War. Unfortunately, I think he never saw action because he was in a plane crash or an accident before he had a chance to go and fight. And he wasn't able to after that because of injuries he sustained.

However, he did know a lot of men who went to war, who flew out in these planes and they, you know, took out the weapons. They had ammunition. They had these belts in their planes and they fought with the enemy. So if they came back and they had no bullets, they had used 'the whole nine yards', literally.

But they had also gone 'the whole nine yards' fighting their hearts out and using up all of their ammunition, figuratively. Okay. They 'went the whole nine yards'. They used 'the whole nine yards', everything, 'the whole nine yards'.

So hopefully now, guys, you understand the expression, 'the whole nine yards'. This is everything. The entire thing. Everything that's required the whole way. Everything. So, as usual, guys, let's go through a little pronunciation exercise.

This is where I'm going to read out a series of words and then phrases for you to work on, your speaking skills, your pronunciation, your Aussie English. So find somewhere where you're away from the rest of the world, from everyone else, and you can speak out loud with confidence and repeat after me. Are you ready? Let's go.

The. The whole. The whole nine. The whole nine yards. The whole nine yards. The whole nine yards. The whole nine yards. The whole nine yards. I went the whole nine yards. You went the whole nine yards. He went the whole nine yards. She went the whole nine yards. We went the whole nine yards. They went the whole nine yards. It went the whole nine yards.

Good job, guys. Good job. Okay, so what can we talk about there in terms of pronunciation? What do you hear happening to the T at the end of 'went' when I say it in the phrase "I went the whole nine yards". /I went/ /I wen(t) the/ /I wen(t) the whole nine yards/. It gets muted. So it comes after an N, which is actually the same tongue position in the mouth as the T, you just don't release it, right? So if you say /nuh/, it's coming out the nose, the sound, and if you say /t/ it's coming out the mouth and you're releasing the, the tongue from the top of the mouth, right.

You're releasing that consonant. The wen-t. Went, went. But because there is a word coming after the word 'went' that starts with a T, we mute that T- because it's a bit hard to say went the really quickly. So there's too many consonants there. We get rid of the middle consonant the T and we say wen(t)◡the, wen(t)◡the, wen(t)◡the. "We wen(t)◡the whole nine yards." "We wen(t)◡the whole nine yards".

And this would be different from the pronunciation of the word 'when' that doesn't have a T at the end of it. If 'when' came before 'the', you would hold that /n/ for longer. You wouldn't kind of mute the consonant. So you would say /when the/, /when the/. Whereas with the word 'went', we say wen(t)◡the and there's like a little bit of silence in there. Wen(t)◡the "I wen(t)◡the whole nine yards", "I wen(t)◡the whole nine yards".

So good job guys! Don't forget if you want to work on your Aussie English pronunciation, check out my Australian Pronunciation Course at www.AussieEnglish.com.au/apc.

Now lastly guys, it's time to work on our listening comprehension. I'm going to play a little clip here from an Aussie TV show called Banished. And this is sort of tied into today's episode because Banished is a series about Convict Australia. So this is back in the day when Australia was settled. I haven't actually seen the entire show. I have seen clips and it looks interesting, but I think it was obviously cancelled because it was just one season.

Anyway, the excerpt is "British convicts are sent to Australia as punishment and are guarded by hundreds of soldiers. However, things get complicated when the guards and the convicts have to adjust to the new rules and surroundings."

So the rules of the game, guys. I'm going to play the clip for you twice and your goal is to listen and write down what you hear being said. It's a great way to train your listening comprehension. Remember, you'll be able to check your answer if you download today's free worksheet. This will be on the website. You should be able to access the link to the website through the podcast player. Just look at the description and you can also check it if you are a Premium Podcast member where it'll obviously be transcribed in the transcript. Okay. So are you ready to go? Here's the first playthrough.

I've seen you before. James. When a man tells you his name, it is only common decency to tell him yours. It's common sense, too. Otherwise, he might give you a name and in five minutes that name could be all over the camp. Gertrude. Anne. Pleased to meet you.

Good job! I know it was a bit of a long one there, but it sort of slowly spoken. There are quite a few gaps, so hopefully you can get everything being said and write it down. Transcribe it yourself. Are you ready for the second playthrough? Let's go.

I've seen you before. James. When a man tells you his name, it is only common decency to tell him yours. It's common sense, too. Otherwise, he might give you a name and in five minutes that name could be all over the camp. Gertrude. Anne. Pleased to meet you.

All right. That's it from me today, guys. I hope you had a good time. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I look forward to chatting to you in the next episode.

And I should say I hope you enjoyed the last episode that came out last week where I interviewed my wife. It had been ages since I got her on the podcast and we've been talking about it for a while with her. She got a job probably, I don't know if it's almost been a year now, that she got this new job of hers where she's a receptionist.

But I had wanted to interview her for ages about the process of getting the job, what it was like, and hopefully help you guys with preparing for job interviews and everything like that. So if you haven't checked that episode out, go do it. I'll see you next time. Thanks for joining me. Catch ya!