Who is murgatroyd heavens to

Ahhhh, I would have never guessed that is where the expression came from in a million years. I thought it was a made up word too. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account.

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Iron Out The Kinks ». Like this: Like Loading Kim Appel said. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. The expression is a variant of the earlier ' heavens to Betsy '. The first record that I can find of 'heavens to Murgatroyd' in print is from the Ohio newspaper The Akron Beacon Journal , March , in a small ad advertising the sale of a ranch:.

It is quite likely that the copywriter got the line from the cartoon series, which was first aired in January There is also an earlier newspaper cartoon, which appeared in the San Francisco Examiner and other US newspapers in October The use of the words 'heaven' and 'Murgatroyd' there may just be coincidence and unconnected to the expression.

It doesn't seem plausible that the phrase was coined in and sat dormant until the s. Despite etymologists' best efforts there isn't any record of the phrase that pre-dates the Yogi Bear cartoon series and it is very likely that it was coined by the show's writers. The frequently repeated suggestion that the phrase was said by Bert Lahr's character in the film Meet The People isn't correct. The Snagglepuss character is very similar to the persona that Bert Lahr adopted on-screen and may well have been based on him.

However, that's as near to Bert Lahr as Heavens to Murgatroyd gets. As with Betsy, we have no idea who Murgatroyd was.