"Going like Billy-O"
No idea who he was...
Billy - oh is The Devil !.
i came across this, and interesting its first recorded in the North East Gazette.
The actual 'Billy-oh' variant is first found in the UK newspaper
The North-Eastern Daily Gazette, August 1885:
It's my umbrella I'll be lavin' at home and shure it'll rain like billy-oh!
Around the same time, a similar phrase emerged in the USA. In the North Dakota newspaper
The Bismarck Tribune, September 1883, there's a piece of what Mel Brooks would have called "authentic frontier gibberish", under the title
An Old Frontiersman Talks:
"You say Ol Grant was 'yar with the gang
And the capital's one hoo-doo
And the people cheered him like billy-be dang
Why, pardner, it can't be true!"
This latter example appears to be a version of 'Billy-be damned', which had been recorded earlier, in 1849, in the
Gold Rush Diary:
"Theodor looked as big as billy-be damned"
The Billy in question is this phrase isn't the Reverend Billio but his arch enemy, the Devil.
The citations above are
minced oaths, that is, euphemistic phrases that endeavour to avoid speaking the name of religious figures.
1849 sees the first use in the USA (and possibly anywhere) of the name billy-goat to denote a male goat. The term 'billy-be damned' indicated the Devil, following the imagery that pictured Satan as a monster in goat's form.
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Gary Martin
