I caught TBS’s re-airing of “The Wizard of Oz” last night. In one scene Dorothy exclaims “Jiminy Cricket!”
I believe this movie pre-dated Disney’s “Pinnochio”. Did Walt retool a popular interjection for the cricket character in his movie?
If so, where did “Jiminy Cricket” as an expression come from?
IIRC, the expression “Jiminy Crickets” was probably a euphemism for the expletive “Jesus Christ!” Disney used the name for a character who was a cricket, as a pun-joke.
Give me a day, I can get better citation than just my memory.
I just had to watch the WOZ again to see the part where the “munchkin commits suicide.”
After Cecil’s explanation, it’s pretty obvious what the image is. I never noticed it before, but that damned bird is all over the place in those scenes.
From Partridge’s Dictionary of slang:
Jiminy Crickets! A widespread Canadian (ex U.S.) expletive, since ca. 1920.
Partridge thinks it’s a euphemism for “Jesus Christ”; he quotes others as saying it stands for “Jesu Domine.”
Read “Sundials” in the new issue of Aboriginal Science Fiction.
www.sff.net/people/rothman
“Jiminy” is a corruption of the Gemini, though I’m not sure how it became attached to an insect. As an exclamation, it’s a fairly cosmic-sounding word that may have been chosen for its grandeur and mysteriousness…
Disney’s Pinicchio, like most of their other movies, was not written from scratch. Rather, it’s based on the book by Carlo Collodi (Lorenzini) http://www.trace.wisc.edu/tcel/tow/WWW/GUTENB/pnoco10.txt
Someone who’s seen the Italian original may confirm (or not) my suspicious that it (the Italian original) doen’t have “Jimmy Cricket”, but the English xlation does.
My recollection is that the Italian original does not name the cricket, it’s simply Pinoch’s conscience. Disney is the one who feels obliged to give names to all the characters (names for each of the seven dwarfs, for instance.)