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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.
Wow, looks like I'm the odd man out here. I've owned at least 8 cars, maybe 9, 10 if you count the one I had to share with my sister for high school wheels. It was just a junker, but it got us around. Anyway, I have never named any of my cars, nor has my wife (to my knowledge). But I do talk to them, usually in a futile attempt to repair something. Come to think of it, I did a lot of talking to my VW bus back in the 70's ... but that was a whole nuther era. Sometimes it talked back.
I've had atheists tel me that the is not a God. My response to that is that there are all manner of Gods. If one talks with his wife in the car, about a big tax refund, it normally takes less than a week for the car to develop some malady that will consume most of that refund. If you discuss it in the kitchen, it will be a house-related expense like a new water heater, or the refrigerator. Not only are those indications of Gods, but the house and the car have different Gods.
In the first of the ten commandments, Jehovah doesn't say he is the only God, merely that he is "thy" God, presumably meaning the tribe of Abraham. Since I have never had a briss, nor (to my knowledge) have any of my forebears, I don't appear to be party to the Covenant. Christians, in general, have that same issue. They don't remember the Sabbath, and instead of worshipping only Jehovah, many worship Jesus and "the holy ghost." They don't keep Kosher. They say God answers prayers, but of all the football teams that pray before every game, there are darned few that have 20-game winning streaks, much less 20 year winning streaks.
That's all easily explained if there are many Gods. Think of God as a term like Mom or Boss or wife, where the term points to someone relative to who's speaking. Mom was a great musician - but maybe your mother was tone deaf. My God appears to be female, and tells me that in general, Gods don't care what you call them. That wacko televangelist that really hates muslims might be absolutely correct as far as his God is concerned. And the less extreme fundamentalist that lives next door is deserving of my respect as well. After all, my god doesn't seem too distressed by suicide bombers in the mideast, which is kinda wacko, but she is very insistent that I practice good husbandry on the 90% of the cells in my body that are not human.
When I explain this to atheists, and point out that perhaps they don't have a god, themselves, they seem a little uncomfortable, and my God tells me I shouldn't do that, but it's OK to tell believers that they may have a different God than those they are trying to convert.
About 1978, there was a clerk on her knees in front of the throw pillows at Danner's Discount Department store. I told her, "It won't work". Mary turned to me and asked, "What won't work?" I told her it's useless to pray to the god of throw pillows, because that God seems not to listen to the prayers of humans. But I learned Mary's name, that she was inventorying the merchandise, and she'd be happy to have supper with me when she got off work in another hour. It turns out that my god thought I needed someone in my life, someone warm, kind, generous with her physical charms, and whose boyfriend was overseas. Six months later, he came back and proposed. I'd have been willing to do that myself, but when someone you love is happy, how can you possibly want to interfere?
So is it possible that Betsy is the name of the God of cars?
Doing some Ngramming on 'hoopie' and 'tin lizzie' brings up a few things:
From The Fordowner, Volume 4 from 1915 comes a little couplet:
"Though there are some who call 'em names,
(Low vulgar boobs, they be);
Tin Lizzie, road-louse, Jewish Pierce,
It never was, to me.
In trying to find an earlier one, I kept finding spurious dates and 1915 is the earliest I found.
The earliest non-spurious, transportation-related hoopie seems to be from 1919.
Added in edit:
I looked up tin lizzie and hoopie in the OxED. Hoopie is not there. (Tin )Lizzie is the second definition with an earliest occurrence of 1913. In the same entry, the first definition has a first occurrence in 1905 saying "Lizzie (boy), an effeminate young man." "Lesbian" is also part of the first definition. With the poem above calling the name callers "vulgar" could tin lizzie be a transfer of the earlier (occurring in print) first definition to say something derogatory about a vehicle?
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