Snopes.com

 

On 7 May 2025, I posted Holy Smokes! about the white or black smoke which the Roman Catholic Cardinals in the Papal Conclave use to signal the status of the election of the next pope. The post mentioned Snopes.com in discussing a misconception about the known origin of the exclamation and I promised to talk about Snopes later. Well, here it is.

Snopes.com is a fact checking website which checks the available documentation about what actually happened at events, the truth of statements and claims, rumors, legends, or hoaxes. The site was originally named the Urban Legends Reference Page. They give their opinions as True, False, Undetermined, Unverifiable, or some variation on these.

            Snopes is sometimes accused of being left-leaning in its political judgements, but the site rejects that charge. If you use the site, that will be left up to you to judge. In the case of the Holy Smokes! exclamation, their judgement of False is based on hard empirical facts which do not depend on any particular religious or political orientation. 

Holy Smoke!

Pope Francis has died and the process of selecting a new pope has begun. Today, the puffs of smoke from the Vatican chimney were black.  The Conclave’s first vote to elect the next pope did not produce enough votes for a single individual to be selected. Traditionally, black smoke from the chimney means that the Cardinals must take at least one more vote, and probably more than that. White smoke means, “We have a Pope!”

Many people believe that this is the origin of the English-language idiomatic expression of surprise, Holy Smoke! Surprisingly, this does not seem to be the case.

Holy Smoke! is a minced oath.  (I will talk about minced oaths in another post). The fact-checking website Snopes.com (I will talk about Snopes.com in another post) says that the belief mentioned above is false. Snopes.com/fact-check/holy-smoke/

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest known written mention of holy smoke was in The Epiphany, a 1627 poem written by Sir J. Beaumont and it references the burning of incense. The earliest known use of holy smoke as an exclamation or expletive was in 1892, by Rudyard Kipling in his The Naulahka.

            The expression may, ultimately, have been derived from the Roman Catholic practice but there is no known documentary proof of this.

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Update: On 8 May 2025, white smoke emerged from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel. Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost was selected as the next Pope. He chose as his regnal name Pope Leo XIV.