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shameless pleading

 

 

 

 

Holy moley!

Unrelated to Sham Wow.

Dear Word Detective:  I’m a student at St John’s College (the Great Books one, not the basketball one), and while reading the Odyssey a friend and I ran across a mention of a plant called “moly” which is sacred and harvested only by the gods. It occurred to us that that the phrase “Holy Moly” might be derived therefrom. As a regular reader of your column, I have some familiarity with the process of hunting up etymologies. Fortunately, we were in the library.  Our first stop was the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which was sadly lacking in information on the subject. We tried the Dictionary of Regional English and The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. All we uncovered was a reference to a comic book character, our idea about the plant prefixed by a “perhaps with reference to,” and a theory that the phrase might be a shortened and reduplicated form of “Holy Moses.” Any ideas for the Johnnies? — Elizabeth Lightwood.

I dunno. Are you sure you want to ask someone who took about 90 seconds to realize what you meant by “Johnnies”? Time for more coffee. Talk among yourselves. OK, I’m back with the coffee, and I just discovered that I already had nearly a full cup sitting right here on my desk. Maybe I should just go back to bed.

You’ve certainly hit all the logical sources in your quest for the source of “holy moly,” and I’m sure you know that you’re lucky to have a library that carries all those reference sources. I’m actually rather shocked that the OED doesn’t even mention “holy moly.” I even looked under the alternate spelling “moley,” and came up with a British slang term meaning “A potato in which razor blades are embedded, used as a weapon.” I’m almost sorry I looked. One other reference source that is helpful in such cases, the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, does have an entry for “holy moley,” but doesn’t add much to what you found elsewhere.

The comic book character you found a reference to is Captain Marvel, the superhero subject of an enormously popular strip written by Bill Parker and C.C. Beck beginning in 1940.  “Holy moley!” (note the spelling) was Captain Marvel’s characteristic exclamation of surprise, and the strip popularized the saying among American youth, along with “Shazam!”, the magic word that mild-mannered radio reporter Billy Batson uttered to transform himself into Captain Marvel. (Yes, the publishers of Superman sued Parker and Beck for copyright infringement in 1953 and won. Captain Marvel returned to print, however, in 1972.

It is remotely possible that the “moly” plant played a role in the authors’ use of “Holy Moley” as Captain Marvel’s catch phrase. “Shazam,” Billy’s magic phrase, was actually the name of the sorcerer who gave him his powers to fight evil, and Shazam himself explained that his name was an acronym made from the names of ancient luminaries (S for the wisdom of Solomon, H for the strength of Hercules, A for the stamina of Atlas, Z for the power of Zeus, A for the courage of Achilles, and M for the speed of Mercury). So someone connected to the strip certainly had an eye for mythology.

But there is solid evidence that “holy moly” was already widely in use in the late 1920s as a jocular euphemism for “Holy Moses,” an oath that, at that time, might well have been offensive to some people. The writers of Captain Marvel simply picked it up and ran with it.

Interestingly, the spelling “moley,” which appeared in the very first issue of the Captain Marvel comic book, may have been influenced by the name of Professor Raymond Charles Moley, quite well-known in the 1930s as an important ally of President Franklin Roosevelt and organizer of his “Brain Trust” of advisors. Moley became even more famous after he turned against the New Deal and became a conservative Republican, and apparently there were political jingles and rhymes at the time coupling the name “Moley” with “holy.” Almost all modern uses I have found of the phrase, however, spell it “holy moly.”

20 comments to Holy moley!

  • Ken Reynhout

    My late uncle, William Woolfolk, was one of the behind-the-scenes original authors and creators of Captain Marvel. He told me that he invented the phrase “Holy Moley,” but did not mention how he came up with it. It even made it into his obituary: http://articles.latimes.com/2003/aug/10/local/me-woolfolk10

  • Grandpa Chet Cox

    Per C. C. Beck, Bill Parker did reference “the food of the gods,” and the first suggestions of the character – which was actually going to be a full team of heroes, each one with one of the powers of one of the ancient gods. Evidently, the editors of the time wanted to have only ONE hero (to compete with Superman) and Parker redesigned his original proposal.
    And then went back to what he considered “real writing” — Mechanix Illustrated.

    *jeep! & God Bless!

  • Colin W

    The last grand prior of the Knights Templar was named Jacques de Molay. Admittedly this sounds flaky, but is it possible that partisans of the order used holy moley to identify each other after he was burned at the stake and the order abolished?

  • John Wolff

    For fun, see Mad Magazine’s “Captain Marble.” His magic word was SHAZOOM. The only part I remember was the “OO” which was the strength of an ox and the strength of another ox. Also see Flesh Garden and others.

  • Galen McKinley

    With no proof I have read the the phrase originated from a Sikh festival called Hola Mohalla in which mock battles are held. The story goes tyhat under the Raj, British soldiers started using the phrase to indicate something extraordinary.

  • Rob Dickinson

    Many years ago, I heard that the expression began because of Molech, an Ammonite god in Canaan. King Solomon built a temple, in which was the Holy of Holies, where God presided over the Ark of the Covenant. However, over time, idolatry crept into the land, including the use of many idols attributed to Molech. God reprimanded them, and said, “Only I am holy…get rid of your idolatry.”

  • James

    The OED doesn’t define “holy moly,” but it does define “moly” quite exhaustively (I wasn’t sure whether Mr. Morris, by quoting only the OED’s definition of “moley,” meant to imply that it failed entirely to cover Homer’s plant as well as the expression under discussion).

    It also offers a number of examples of “holy [whatever]!” as an expletive, and gives their place of origin as the U.S.; I assume that the OED’s compilers were satisfied to list just a handful of illustrations, rather than to hunt down every variant (or even to privilege one variant over another), given the sheer size of ground they were trying to cover.

  • Charlie Flynn

    I remember from out of the past (I’m talking fifty or sixty years ago) a piece of rhyming drivel that would not (probably) pass today’s PC strictures. Thus:

    Holy Moly, King of the Jews
    Bought his wife a pair of shoes
    When the shoes began to wear,
    Holy Moly, did he swear.

  • Lelde

    Mauli–hindi for red theead Holy Mauli

  • Lelde

    Mauli : red threads used in Hindi ceremony

  • Bill Weidner

    prefer the original with the e

  • Tom

    There is a reference here to Molech it in my research has come up along with holy cow both as a reference to the god(demon) Molech .

  • John

    Holy moley came from Amos and Andy…….a tv siires in the early days

  • Vid

    I believe it originated during the British Raj, roundabout the same time as ‘holy cow’. A moley is the Hindi name for the sacred thread worn by Hindus on their wrist, hence the term ‘holy moley’.

  • Anonymous

    is holy mollie holy water?

    Is Mary Mollie?

  • Dr

    When the snow melts and the grass begins to show, and you see all the holes from the moles, you probably would say, HOLY MOLEY ?

  • Graeme

    Wiktionary believes that “Moley” is a deliberate corruption, of Molly (for rhyming purposes). Molly is (or was) a common nickname for Mary.

    I personally suspect, without supporting evidence, that this is an abbreviation of “Holy Moley, Mother of God!”.

    I also personally suspect that it arose in Ireland, as my memory strongly associates the longer phrase with an Irish accent.

    I also think that I encountered the full version in the sitcom “Father Ted”, but both of these could be cases of my memory feeding me that which I want to believe!

  • chris brown

    Might the Sikh festival of Hola Mohalla also be a source?

  • Jennifer Sanders

    CS Lewis refers to ‘the herb moly’ in his essay ‘Fern-seed & Elephants’ (publ: Collins 1975 p114). It’s a figurative reference in his context for holding out against debaters who are proponents of those who reconstruct the origin/genesis of various literary texts.

  • Chris Karen

    Ah Pishaw! (would love to know about that!) But I say phooey and pishaw for all of the other answers, but only because I wanted to use those words. And also add a little of the modern carrying on of Holey Moley. Everyone knows it is Spanish, coming from Mexico and the tree of the Avocado fruit that makes a heavenly dish called GUACAMOLE …and all of us modern kids haha have shortened it into Holey Moley! Have I lost my cotton picking mind? (I bet I can guess that one right ) LOL.this morning was my first time here and I am in love! Thank You!

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