God Blind Me = Gordon Bennett??

In my continuing adventures trying to learn the British language, I've discovered something so obscure for us non-British speakers I just had to share.

As you may or may not know, I'm supervising a 4th year Engineering Student in what we would call back home his Senior Design Project. Many thanks to the folks in the BSE department and the TMDL group for sharing data with me so I didn't have to go redownload everything myself to give this student so he could do his project on Beaver Creek.

Part of my supervision is teaching this student how to use various hydrological software packages. He is continually amazed by throwbacks to DOS that can still be found in several programs (e.g., ArcGIS) (recall this student is probably about 21...so born around 1988...since Windows 1.0 was released in 1985, he probably never had a computer with the old DOS interface that provided us with such wonderful things like The Oregon Trail as children...). Most recently, he discovered an oddity in the WDMUtil program wherein the path name (e.g., C:/Documents and Settings/My Documents/etc) has to be really short or you get an error saying it's not a valid file. I told him this (saying he would just love the latest example of ancient programs) and this was his response:

"Haha, Gordon bennett...you are right, I do love this."

I briefly considered that Gordon bennett was his new nickname for me, and was rather dismayed at the implications of that. However, Aaron did a quick search and found this link. So apparently this exclamation of surprise originally started as 'God blind me'...which makes enough sense in normal English. This became Gor blimey, which I could easily see given some of the thicker British accents here. How this finally jumped to an actual person's name, Gordon Bennett, is just one of those mysteries of the British language we may never understand...and which is completely alien to foreigners like myself!!