I’d like to know where the term “Heavens to Betsy” comes from. I’m already aware that the term “Heavens to Murgatroyd” comes from the cartoon cat Snaggletooth.
I don’t know, but I’m in good company, because Merriam-Webster doesn’t either.
http://www.m-w.com/wftw/99may/052699.htm
WAG CITY ( nice disclaimer, huh? They don’t call me the Sultan of Side-Stepping for nothing!). My guess is that Betsy is the commoner’s term for Elisabeth/Elizabeth. As in… Queen Elisabeth. Could this be a reference to HRH?
And, if I’m right, do I get to wear my Elizabethan Collar in public??? Please???
If you want to kiss the sky, you’d better learn how to kneel.
I’ve posted my theories on similar expressions in the past. “Heavens to Betsy” is similar to “heck” instead of “hell” and “jeepers” instead of “Jesus” and “shucks” instead of shit. You can’t go around exclaiming “hell’s bells” or “Jesus Christ” when something surprises you at the church social, but even your old maiden aunt could blurt out “heavens to Betsy” or “gee whillikers” and get away with it. It’s like cockney rhyming slang, seemingly meaningless but related in a rhyming manner to a different expression. I would tend to think “heavens to Betsy” replaces “hell’s bells” but I like Cartooniverse’s theory tying it to Queen Elizabeth. Who could say you have a profane blasphemous manner of speaking when all you exclaimed was a wish the queen would go to heaven? Although the English people used Bess (Good Queen Bess) rather than Betsy when referring to Elizabeth I. Betsy strikes me as an American contraction. Was the American woman who sewed the first American flag named Betsy Ross?
Yep. This one is rough. Even Charles Funk, who titled one of his explorations of colorful speech Heavens to Betsey! sadly notes in the foreword that “The title selected at the very outset for the book itself turned out eventually to be completely unsolvable.”
(He does go on to say, as AlZheimers has already noted, that the expression is not used in Britain and that Betsy is an American form. He also notes that the American long rifle was sometimes known as Betsy (the British musket is the Brown Bess), but he was unable to find any connection down that path.)
Tom~
Funk’s book was spelled Betsy; I simply enjoy typing "e"s.
I read a book about fifteen years ago entitled “I Declare to Betsy (and other sayings)” and it gave an explanation for where this saying came from. All I remember is that it said that “heavens to Betsy” somehow came from the original “I declare to Betsy” but I’ll be damned if I remember anything else about it.
Big help I am, eh?
Hey, Uppity, every little bit helps. The combined intellect of the Straight Dopers may solve this.
Here’s my latest theory. The English people developed a very popular, and inoffensive, exclamation “heaven to Bess” as a reaction to the Pope’s excommunication and condemnation of their “Good Queen Bess” to eternal hellfire for her support of the Church of England against Catholicism. The recent movie “Elizabeth” illustrated this moment in history. People need exclamations for conversational purposes but, when blasphemy is a capital crime, you can’t go around saying “Jesus Christ” of “Goddamnit” every time you are surprised.
At the same time Elizabethans were colonizing America. About a hundred years later the American colonists rebelled against England. They couldn’t eliminate the by then deeply engrained popular expression “heaven to Bess” but a bunch of republican revolutionaries couldn’t very well be wishing an English monarch well so they mutated it into “heavens to Betsy”.
I wouldn’t call this a WAG. How about a “crackpot theory”?
No one is going to challenge this statement in the OP? Popularizing a saying is not the same as inventing it. “Heavens to Murgatroyd” was around long before Snaggletooth made it his trademark remark.
Put that in your Funk & Wagnall’s and smoke it!
I have the body of a god – Buddha!