“Hell’s Bells!”, an exclamation along the lines of “darn!”, is likely just variation of hellfire, and reinforced by its rhyme. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Origin of “Hell’s Bells””
Hi, you have A Way with Words.
Hello. This is Bob Berner. I’m calling from Monticello, Florida, up here in the Big Bend area up at Tallahassee.
All right. Well, welcome to the show, Bob. How can we help you?
My mama was, her mother, I should say, was raised up in Arkansas. Whenever you’d spill your milk or get a fishing hook cut in your thumb, she’d say, hell’s bells. And I never really heard anybody else use it, my mama. I was just wondering where that came from.
We’ve got a couple guesses on that. It’s a rhyming variation of hellfire. It’s a mild oath. And sometimes people thought hellfire was just a little too impolite to be said around other folks, so they’d rhyme it up with hell’s bells. There’s a whole variety. Hell’s britches, hell’s boots, hell’s fury, hell’s teeth, hell’s smoke. And hell’s bells kind of stuck around a lot longer and is used more often just because it rhymes.
Yeah, that’s good to know. Anytime, anything, you have a flat tire, mostly spilling my milk is when I’d catch the devil. We moved to the Virgin Islands, and we had a—me and my wife moved down there. We’ve done there 13 years, and we started writing letters back and forth to Mama, back before cell phones. And the first time she ever wrote me a letter, she wrote—I assumed what she wrote was hell spells, but her F’s looked like O’s, and we walked around for days trying to figure out what hello bellow meant. We finally figured it was hell’s bells.
Yeah, hell’s bells. It’s a mild oath. It’s about as impolite as some folks ever get. We’ve got hell’s bells in the dictionaries back to the 1830s, so it’s been around for a while.
Yeah, I’ve heard plenty of people use it. Yeah, her family was from Scotts Island and an American Indian, Arkansas Indian or Oklahoma Indian. I don’t know where she got it. I’ve never really heard anybody else say it except my mother.
Bob, you are refreshing to talk to. Thank you so much for calling us, all right? Thank you very much. All right, take care now. Call us again sometime. Okay, thank you. All right, bye-bye.
Sometimes hell’s bells is just shortened to bells, which is even more polite. Oh, no kidding. Bells, really? Yeah, just bells. Yeah, just bells said with a lot of oomph.
Oh, you think that’s what Poe was writing? No. Owl is thundering, bells, bells, bells. Go on, try it again. That’s from 1929.
Okay, all right. Well, call us with your language questions, 877-929-9673, or send them in email. The address is words@waywordradio.org.
