What's your car's name?
There's no fuel pump on the Model T Ford. It was gravity-fed, with the tank above and behind the engine. If you were going up a steep grade, sometimes you needed to back up to keep the engine from dying of thirst. Sometimes, in the movies, a car would be struggling with a steep grade - more to do with being underpowered than lack of a fuel pump - so what would the driver do He'd hunch up on the wheel and say, "Come'on, Betsy."
Unless it was a Roy Rogers movie, where Pat Brady would plead with Nellybelle, his jeep.
Why Betsy, though? If it started with the Model T, why not Lizzie? For that matter, why Tin Lizzie, rather than Tin Winnie, or Tin Tootie?
Alex Lloyd says 35% of us name our cars and while Betsy remains clear in the top spot, the second and third most favored nicknames are Bessie and Betty, according to one report from AutoNation. Basically every old person’s name that starts with the letter “B.”
Well, not every old name, Alex. It's traditional to give vessels a female name, except for warships. It might bring a smile to think of the USS John F Kennedy wearing Enola Gay scanties, and while Enola is clearly more powerful, it wouldn't do to have enemy combatants snickering at JFK instead of quaking in their boots.
Lloyd thinks perhaps the name Betsy comes from a 1978 movie "The Betsy", but he doesn't even seem to know that was a famous Harold Robbins novel in 1971. He must be very young to realize that Robbins was using a really old meme, rather than inventing a new one.
There's no joy at the ngrams viewer. Nothing found for a case-insensitive come on Betsy or for c'mon Betsy, and if I stick a comma where it needs to be, it thinks it's two phrases; I need to escape the comma, but nothing seems to work.
So how did we come to name our cars Betsy? (For the record, the last time I named a car, it was Lydia, after Harold Arlen's song about a lady with eyes that folks adore so, And a torso even more so. The eyes are window into the Wreck of the Hesperus.)
On another blog that I frequent, people make frequent reference to an insurance commercial that describes a car named Brad. Starts with B, but definitely not a female name (unless you actually remember Jo Jo Liebler's character in the movie The Making of '...And God Spoke'). Also not an "old person's name" by any stretch.
My daughter started our family naming our cars (but my folks had a 1950 Chevy named 'Hoopie' when I was growing up). She named a 1975 Dodge Dart 'Jill'. Shortly afterward, a 1978 Bronco was named 'Jack'. (Jill was applied to some later cars too.)
My current commute car is a 2005 Taurus named Frosty. The 1989 3/4-ton farm truck is named White Knight. The 2007 Taurus is Babe the Blue Ox.
There are too many previously owned vehicles to list all their names, but I had a about-1982 3/4-ton truck that someone had welded a couple of horse shoes, a sucker rod end, a bent washer, and a few other parts into a cowboy-looking character mounted on the grill guard. The cowboy (and truck) were named Slim.
EmmettRedd said
My daughter started our family naming our cars (but my folks had a 1950 Chevy named 'Hoopie' when I was growing up). She named a 1975 Dodge Dart 'Jill'. Shortly afterward, a 1978 Bronco was named 'Jack'. (Jill was applied to some later cars too.)
Here is Sir Mix-a-Lot. This song is from 1989 so I'm guessing it is more recent than your folk's car. Interesting coincident.
Dick said
EmmettRedd said
My daughter started our family naming our cars (but my folks had a 1950 Chevy named 'Hoopie' when I was growing up). She named a 1975 Dodge Dart 'Jill'. Shortly afterward, a 1978 Bronco was named 'Jack'. (Jill was applied to some later cars too.)Here is Sir Mix-a-Lot. This song is from 1989 so I'm guessing it is more recent than your folk's car. Interesting coincident.
I'm not sure hoopie and hooptie are really the same name. Strictly guessing, I'd guess the 1950 Chevy evolved from "whoopee" while the 1989 whatever evolved from "hoops" (i.e. pickup basketball.) That's because "whoopee" has largely disappeared, while nobody seemed to call it hoops in the 1950s. Scant evidence, and I am not at all convinced my conclusion is right.