Jumping Up Bald-Headed

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lori calling from upstate New York.

All right, well, welcome to the show. How can we help you?

Well, you know, I grew up in the middle of the state of Maine, and my father used to always use a term when he was either frustrated or vexed or just mad. He would say, holy old jumping up, bald-headed. Sometimes he’d just say, oh, jumping, because we knew what he meant. But it was always kind of funny in our family, and I just never knew where it came from or what it meant.

Holy, old, jumping up, bald-headed. Bald-headed.

Wow.

Conjures an image, doesn’t it?

It does.

It conjures an image of Grant.

Because I’m holy or bald-headed?

Because you’re jumping up, you know?

Lori, tell me a little bit about your father. How old were you when you remember him saying this? How old was he?

Probably all of my life, I remember him saying it. He was born in 1935. He grew up in Connecticut. He was also in the service. I don’t know.

Okay.

He just always said it. And he said it when he was frustrated about something?

Or surprised or just generally vexed. It would be something that would be kind of funny, but he could also be mad when he said it. So I don’t really know.

Holy old jumping up bald-headed. Holy old jumping up bald-headed.

I’m hearing three things in there. What he’s done is he’s combined three mild oaths. Or maybe you just called them minced oaths, and put them together in one long string. And he may not have been the only person to do that.

So the first one, the holy, usually Jesus is in there when people use this. And actually Jesus is also connected to jumping. So people say, jump in Jesus, or it’s also related to jump in Jehoshaphat. Or they’ll say, jumped up Jesus. And then they’ll say, bald-headed Jesus. So jumped up Jesus goes back at least 100 years.

Oh.

Yeah, you can find it listed in a variety of slang dictionaries, and you can look in old books and old newspapers and find a pretty solid history of it.

Now, the other interesting thing here is sometimes people say Jesus Palomino.

Ooh, what does that mean?

It’s another one of these kind of like just funny to say kind of mild oaths. And the reason I’m bringing this up, I’ll tell you in a second, okay? Just hang on to that thought.

And then bald-headed Jesus goes back to at least the 1960s. Again, these are all used in exactly the same way that your father used them. When you’re frustrated or angry, but not terribly so, and you’re kind of throwing a little humor into a wry situation where maybe you look the fool or something’s broken that shouldn’t have broken or something broke at the wrong time, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

The reason I brought these all three together in this way is that it was used by a character played by Gary Busey in a 1985 movie called Silver Bullet.

Oh, that’s interesting.

Yeah, and if you go on YouTube, you can find exactly that. Only what he says is, holy jumped up bald headed Jesus Palomino. He combines them all together. And it may also have been used in the movie 1941, which was released in 1979. If you remember, this was kind of a, I don’t know, boondog was not the word, but a terrible movie. Did not do very well at the box office. Had Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Ned Beatty. But anyway, there’s a novelization of that movie 1941 that includes a version of this longer form, just like your father used it.

So that’s why I wanted to know, did your father, do you remember him saying it before, say, 1979?

Oh, absolutely. I was born in 65, so I remember it my whole life.

Okay.

Yeah, that’s really interesting. I mean, there’s no doubt that it was out there floating in the ether somewhere. He doesn’t have to have picked it up from a movie, but you never know. I’m curious. Did he use profanity?

No, not a lot. And that does make sense when you say that because we’re a devout Catholic family and five children. And they didn’t really swear a lot around us children. So that would have been a healthy alternative.

Yeah, that would have been a way to do it. Because that’s the kind of person that he was. So that makes perfect sense.

Well, there you go, Lori.

Well, I thank you so much.

Yeah, sure. You should look up that clip on YouTube. Just Google Holy Jumped Up Bold Headed Jesus Palomino and you’ll go right to it.

Well, I’m going to.

Thanks for calling, Lori.

Thanks for calling.

Thank you for your time.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Mince those, smile those, or no oats at all. Give us a call, 877-929-9673. Email us, words@waywordradio.org. And our Twitter handle is W-A-Y-W-O-R-D, and you can find us all over Facebook.