"all my eye and Betty Martin" meaning in English

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Noun

Etymology: In Britain during the 1700s, the phrase was a common claim of dismissal (similar to 'nonsense', or 'hogwash'), or a way to declare disbelief of an absurdity. It possibly originated as the punch line of a joke (though this is likely a folk etymology). Most variations of the joke involve a British sailor visiting Italy. He overhears a Latin prayer, "Ah! [Da] mihi, beate Martine" (which translates to "Ah! Grant to me, blessed Martin", referring to St. Martin). The sailor mishears the prayer, and later uses the phrase as "All my eye and Betty Martin". Head templates: {{en-noun|-}} all my eye and Betty Martin (uncountable)
  1. (dated) rubbish, humbug Tags: dated, uncountable Synonyms: all my eye

Download JSON data for all my eye and Betty Martin meaning in English (2.3kB)

{
  "etymology_text": "In Britain during the 1700s, the phrase was a common claim of dismissal (similar to 'nonsense', or 'hogwash'), or a way to declare disbelief of an absurdity. It possibly originated as the punch line of a joke (though this is likely a folk etymology). Most variations of the joke involve a British sailor visiting Italy. He overhears a Latin prayer, \"Ah! [Da] mihi, beate Martine\" (which translates to \"Ah! Grant to me, blessed Martin\", referring to St. Martin). The sailor mishears the prayer, and later uses the phrase as \"All my eye and Betty Martin\".",
  "head_templates": [
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      "expansion": "all my eye and Betty Martin (uncountable)",
      "name": "en-noun"
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  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
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      "examples": [
        {
          "text": "1881 Thomas Bastard, The Autobiography of Cockney Tom, at Project Gutenberg Australia\nAll my eye and Betty Martin, thought I, I will have no more truck with you."
        },
        {
          "ref": "1893 November, R. D. Blackmore, “Perlycross”, in Macmillan's Magazine, volume LXIX, page 83",
          "text": "Oh, that's all my eye and Betty Martin! Nobody believes that, I should hope.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1989, Tim Smith, On Land and in the Sea, The Safety Bowl",
          "text": "Bins the bowl as he says \"Falsehoods and a man of straw is all my eye and Betty Martin saw\"",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "rubbish, humbug"
      ],
      "id": "en-all_my_eye_and_Betty_Martin-en-noun-nSXYCRFG",
      "links": [
        [
          "rubbish",
          "rubbish"
        ],
        [
          "humbug",
          "humbug"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(dated) rubbish, humbug"
      ],
      "synonyms": [
        {
          "word": "all my eye"
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      ],
      "tags": [
        "dated",
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    }
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  "word": "all my eye and Betty Martin"
}
{
  "etymology_text": "In Britain during the 1700s, the phrase was a common claim of dismissal (similar to 'nonsense', or 'hogwash'), or a way to declare disbelief of an absurdity. It possibly originated as the punch line of a joke (though this is likely a folk etymology). Most variations of the joke involve a British sailor visiting Italy. He overhears a Latin prayer, \"Ah! [Da] mihi, beate Martine\" (which translates to \"Ah! Grant to me, blessed Martin\", referring to St. Martin). The sailor mishears the prayer, and later uses the phrase as \"All my eye and Betty Martin\".",
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
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      },
      "expansion": "all my eye and Betty Martin (uncountable)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
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        "English dated terms",
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English entries with language name categories using raw markup",
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        "English terms with quotations",
        "English uncountable nouns",
        "Quotation templates to be cleaned"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "text": "1881 Thomas Bastard, The Autobiography of Cockney Tom, at Project Gutenberg Australia\nAll my eye and Betty Martin, thought I, I will have no more truck with you."
        },
        {
          "ref": "1893 November, R. D. Blackmore, “Perlycross”, in Macmillan's Magazine, volume LXIX, page 83",
          "text": "Oh, that's all my eye and Betty Martin! Nobody believes that, I should hope.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1989, Tim Smith, On Land and in the Sea, The Safety Bowl",
          "text": "Bins the bowl as he says \"Falsehoods and a man of straw is all my eye and Betty Martin saw\"",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "rubbish, humbug"
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      "links": [
        [
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        ],
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      "raw_glosses": [
        "(dated) rubbish, humbug"
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      "tags": [
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  "synonyms": [
    {
      "word": "all my eye"
    }
  ],
  "word": "all my eye and Betty Martin"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-04-30 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (210104c and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.