Bob's your uncle

4 June 2020 (updated 15 June 2020)

Bob’s Your Uncle is a British expression meaning everything will be all right, everything is arranged, no worries. Alas, the identity of Bob is unknown, and the early record of the phrase is sketchy, affording few clues as to its origin.

The website Wordhistories.net  reports an early, isolated appearance in the East Aberdeenshire Observer (Peterhead, Scotland) from 12 November 1891. I have not been able to independently verify its accuracy. That website reports the paper as saying:

Teetotalers, as a rule, are always to be viewed with a certain amount of suspicion. The very principle—if principle it can be called—which differentiates them from the great mass of ordinary humanity, proves that there is a specially weak point in their natures, that they are morally and mentally lop-sided, and therefore “worth the watching.” It is a relief to know that the lop-sided Feuars will be well watched while Bailie Ross sits at the Board, and to him I with confidence address the counsel “Go it as you have begun! Bob’s yer Uncle!”

If this quotation is accurate and dated correctly (I have no reason to think it isn’t; I just am unable to check), it pushes the date of the phrase somewhat earlier but still gives us no clue as to its origin.

The oldest use that I have found for the phrase is in a song title. Unfortunately, the songwriter and the lyrics are unknown. All I have is a reference to the song in a 1923 advertisement by the Herman Darewski Music Publishing Company that appears in the British publication The Stage:

New Songs.
You May Have Some Loving But You Can’t Have It All
Dearest You’re the Nearest to My Heart
Forever                     Tomahawk Blues
Trifling                        Bobs Your Uncle

The phrase next appears in a series of June 1924 advertisements for a theatrical revue that was appearing in a Dundee, Scotland theater. The ad for 19 June 1924 reads:

VICTORIA THEATRE
6.50—Twice Nightly.—8.50
The Great Comedy Revue
BOB’S YOUR UNCLE

Unfortunately, there is no information about this performance other than the title. Whether or not it is related to the song advertised the previous year is unknown.

About ten years later, a song of that title turns up again. This time it is performed by Leslie Sarony and Leslie Holmes, an act billed as The Two Leslies. A review of their act that appears in the Hull Daily Mail on 22 January 1935 reads:

Song writers may be numerous; "hit"-song writers are not so numerous; and songster-"hit"-song-writers are but few.  Of the latter class are these Leslies, writing all their own material, and scoring "hits" nearly all the time.  Think of "Rhymes," "Tweet, tweet," "Ain't it grand to be blooming-well dead?" "The Old Sow," "Wheezy Anna"-and wait for "Try" and "Bob's Your Uncle" (this last title will eclipse all the rest).

Sarony, in particular, became rather well known, but I can find no other mention of a song titled Bob’s Your Uncle by him. It could be the same song advertised in 1923, and Sarony could have been one of the writers and performers of the 1924 revue of that title, but we simply don’t know. The parenthetical comment about the song eclipsing the others hints that it might have been a hit, but the lack of information about the song, including the lack of extant lyrics, militates against it being well known.

These early musical titles tell us that the phrase was circulating in the 1920s, but they don’t give us any information about how it was used, what it meant, or what its origin is. There are later songs of that title or that use the phrase in their lyrics, as well.

The earliest extant use that gives us an idea of how the phrase was used is in a personal advertisement taken out by a litigant who had won a civil lawsuit. From the Essex Newsman of 3 March 1928:

Mr. A.H. Solder (Bob’s your Uncle) wishes to THANK all good friends for their congratulations on his successfully defending the action in the High Courts this week.

It’s a bit cryptic, but by using it Solder seems to be saying that the matter is settled, everything is good. Another instance that conveys the same sparse information comes from the world of horseracing. In November 1932, a horse name Bob won the Epsom Derby Cup, prompting a sportswriter to say:

It was a case of “Bob’s your uncle” at Derby yesterday, for the three-year-old of that name put up a splendid performance to win the Derby Cup.

Clearly this is a play on the existing phrase and the name of the horse.

A few years later we get an account of it being used in speech, by a man arrested for drunk driving, as reported by the Essex Chronicle on 11 December 1936:

Witness [i.e., Police Constable McKenna] asked him if he had a friend with him to drive the car, and he replied: “Yes, no, I don’t know where my friends are, do you? What’s the matter? Let’s have a drink.”

Witness continued: He then patted me on the cheek and said, “I have been a naughty boy. Had one over the eight. Not so bad Bob’s your uncle.”

Finally, we get a clear sense of how Bob’s your uncle is used in a 1937 account of a man describing how easy he has it at work. From the Yorkshire Evening Post, 11 January 1937:

“So long as you behave yourself, nurse your congregation, say a few commonplace and trite things to your folk every week, Bob's your uncle.” For the moment I could not recall an avuncular Robert, but I knew what my acquaintance meant.

So, from these early uses we understand how the phrase was used and that it was in use in the 1920s, but we still have no idea who Bob is. If we had the lyrics to the 1923 song, that might point the way—that song might even be the origin. But we don’t have them, and the fact that we don’t hints that the song, as well as Sarony’s 1935 song (if they aren’t one and the same), wasn’t all that popular and is thus unlikely to have been the origin.

Where does it come from? The most likely explanation, although one that is by no means certain, is that it is a play on an older slang phrase all is bob, meaning all is well. This use appears as early as 1699 in a slang dictionary:

It’s all bob, c. all is safe, the bet is secured

The problem with this explanation is that this use of bob or all is bob seems to die out around 1850. The gap in recorded coverage is such that those who were likely to have used Bob’s your uncle in the 1920s, wouldn’t have been alive long enough to remember the older slang expression.

Another explanation that is commonly proffered is that the phrase relates to Robert Cecil, the third marquess of Salisbury, and his nephew Arthur Balfour. The younger man rose through party and government ranks while his uncle was prime minister, creating rumblings of nepotism. The dates are right for this. Balfour was appointed Secretary for Scotland in 1886 and as Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1887, while his uncle was prime minister. He then succeeded his uncle as prime minister in 1902. But other than it being chronologically possible, we have no evidence that the phrase is indeed linked to Cecil and Balfour, and the explanation bears all the marks of an after-the-fact justification rather than a true origin.

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[On 15 June 2020 I added the 1891 citation.]

Sources:

Advertisement. Evening Telegraph (Dundee, Scotland). 19 June 1924.

“Allegations Against a Chelmsford Motorist.” Essex Chronicle (Chelmsford, England), 11 December 1936, 4.

Baker, John. “Bob’s Your Uncle: Antedating and History.” American Dialect Society Mailing List (ADS-L), 25 August 2014.

B.E. A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew. London: W. Hawes, 1699. Early English Books Online.

“Bob’s Your Uncle” (personal advertisement). Essex Newsman (Chelmsford, England). 3 March 1928, 1.

The Ferret. “Careful Sailor Good To-Day.” Courier and Advertiser (Dundee, Scotland). 19 November 1932, 7.

Goranson, Stephan. “Bob’s your Uncle antedated (?) to 1928, 1929...” American Dialect Society Mailing List (ADS-L), 5 July 2012.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. bob’s your uncle phr., bob adj.

Herman Darewski Music Publishing, Advertisement, The Stage, 11 January 1923, 2.182, 28.

“Tivoli—Variety.” Daily Mail (Hull, England), 22 January 1935, 5.

Tréguer, Pascal. “Meaning, Origin, and History of ‘Bob’s Your Uncle.’” Wordhistories.net. 4 June 2018.

microaggression

15 June 2020

A microaggression is a subtle, often unintentional, action that exhibits a prejudice or discriminates against a marginalized minority. Microaggressions may be minor, almost unnoticeable, slights, and a single or even a few instances may be insignificant. But when they are experienced daily over the course of years, or even a lifetime, the psychic toll on a person can be great.

While microaggressions are sociologically important, in many ways the word is linguistically uninteresting. For instance, its origin is unexceptional, a compound of the combining form micro- + aggression.

But the word does have two distinguishing features. The first is that we can pinpoint exactly who coined it and when, and the second is that it is an excellent example of what linguist Arnold Zwicky calls the recency illusion, the belief that a word or phrase that you have just noticed for the first time is genuinely new, when in fact it has been around for a long time, in this case some fifty years.

To those points, it was coined by Harvard psychiatrist Chester Pierce in F. B. Barbour’s 1970 The Black Seventies:

Hence the therapist is obliged to pose the idea that offensive mechanisms are usually a micro-aggression, as opposed to a gross, dramatic, obvious macro-aggression such as lynching.

Most terms or new usages arise in casual usage, and their very first uses go unrecorded. It’s not until sometime later, sometimes years, that they actually see print. Exceptions to this are often scientific and technical terms, where researchers are often careful to call out new terms that they use. This is one of these latter cases. And indeed, microaggression remained restricted to psychiatric and psychological literature for many years.

It’s not until seventeen years after Pierce coined it that microaggression appears in a mainstream publication, in this case, the Chicago Tribune of 15 September 1987. This usage is also useful in that it gives several practical examples of what constitutes a microaggression. But this example still refers to Pierce and his research, showing that the term had yet to become familiar to a broader audience:

Leon Boyd stepped into a CTA bus on his way to work on the North Side and discovered that he was being transformed into a monster.

At first, Boyd said, the symptoms were subtle.

"I would catch them glancing out of the corner of their eyes, looking at me," Boyd said of nervous passengers.

"They practically crammed themselves into the seat not to touch me. Then they'd adjust their bags and purses or draw their purses tight around their arms."

[...]

A study by Chester Pierce, a professor of education at Harvard University, suggests that episodes similar to those described by Boyd occur routinely. Labeling the phenomenon "microaggression and microinsult," Pierce demonstrated through experiments that black men often are mistreated and stigmatized in public by whites.

By 1992, microaggression could be used without reference to psychiatrists or psychological literature, as in this article from the Philadelphia Tribune on 15 October 1993 about rapper MC Lyte:

Lyte sings: "...doing 80 by funeral mourners—showing little respect—now that's a ruffneck." But notice that Lyte said "showing little respect," not no respect.

Nevertheless, her ruffneck still falls outside the bounds of conventional social respectability. But is it possible that our world of so-called social respectability is itself infested with levels of microaggression, microinsanity and micro-dysfunctionality glossed over and hidden by the societal tendency to highlight the adaptive "brutality" and coarseness of a ruffneck/gangsta b----? And is "brutality" a biological trait? Or is "brutality" a social construct used to label, misinform and consequently render a certain group worthless and hopeless?

The Philadelphia Tribune is an African-American newspaper, which indicates that, as one might expect from its definition, microaggression made inroads into the Black community first, while white America remained largely oblivious to it. And indeed, neither the Corpus of Contemporary American English or the News on the Web Corpus contain examples of the word until 2012, indicating that it was vanishingly rare in mainstream publications and websites until this past decade, some forty years after it was coined.

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Sources:

Blake, John. “Miscast ‘Monsters’ of the Streets: Skin Color Makes These Men into Magnets of Fear and Scorn.” Chicago Tribune, 15 September 1987, D1. ProQuest.

Davies, Mark. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): One billion words, 1990-2019.

Davies, Mark. Corpus of News on the Web (NOW): 10 billion words from 20 countries, updated every day.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2018, s.v. microaggression, n.

Yancy, George. “Behind the ‘Gangsta.’” Philadelphia Tribune, 15 October 1993, 7A. ProQuest.

Buckley's chance

14 June 2020

Buckley’s chance is Australian and New Zealand slang meaning no chance at all. The origin of the phrase is unknown, other than the fact that it had its start in Australia. But there are two plausible explanations that have been put forward. Unfortunately, the early evidence of use, as is often the case with slang, is sketchy and doesn’t help us determine who Buckley was or why he had had little hope of succeeding.

The earliest use of the phrase that I know of is as the name of a racehorse. From a New South Wales newspaper of 27 March 1872:

IVANHOE RACES
Saturday, 16th March, 1872.
The following are the results of the above races: —
Maiden Plate, £5, l½ mile. — Buckley's Chance, (Buckley) Bryant's Marmion, McKenna's Win if I can, Mutlow's Modestv.
[...]
On the 18th a Match for £5. — Buckley's Chance, (Buckley) Millard's Turpin, won easily by Chance. Match 1½ miles £10. — Millard's Blondin. (Kennedy) McWiggan's Donkey, won easily by Blondin.

It seems that the horse was owned by someone named Buckley, so we can’t tell if the horse was named for the phrase, or if it was just named Chance and the owner’s name appended to it in order to distinguish it from other horses named Chance. This appearance is more than a decade before the slang phrase indisputably appears, so it’s very possible that it’s unrelated to the phrase. There have been several other racehorses with the name Buckley’s Chance over the years; this appears to be the first.

The first clear use of the slang phrase appears in the context of cricket in the 22 September 1887 issue of the Melbourne Punch:

In our sporting columns, in the Fitzroy team appears the name of Bracken. I should have been BUCKLEY. “Olympus” explains that he altered it because he didn’t want the Fitzroy men to have “Buckley’s chance.” Well, that’ll do. He can score his point this time—a thing he wouldn’t have dreamt of letting him do if he had played the “typographical error” business. In the Fitzroy team the asterisks (*) speak for themselves.

The meaning of Buckley’s chance is clear in the above quotation, but much of the context is obscure, unless you’re an expert in late nineteenth-century, Australian cricket. An example that’s clearer to us today is from a few months later. Again, from the Melbourne Punch, but this time 23 February 1888:

The fielding all round was really excellent, the snavelling of every possible show for a catch being still the feature of the game. Hostilities will be restrained on Saturday; but with only 63 runs to the good, I am afraid the “natty” Ormond have got “Buckley’s chance.” Still, cricket’s a funny game, and equally as much as in horse-racing, you never can tell till the numbers go up.

This use, however, is still marked with quotation marks, indicating that the editors still considered it unusual. But within a few years, the phrase is appearing without italics or quotation marks. From the Daily News (Perth) of 21 March 1892:

He might have sneaked ahead so far in the first mile and a half that they would’nt [sic] have had Buckley’s chance of catching him afterwards.

All of the earliest citations of Buckley’s chance are in sports writing, mostly horseracing and cricket. The earliest non-sporting use I have found is also the earliest from New Zealand. From the New Zealand Observer and Free Lance of 10 September 1892:

Buckley and Nunn storefront in Melbourne (now David Jones)

It is presumed that the defendant’s solicitor was nettled at his successive defeats, for he so far forgot himself as to send the cheque in settlement, which by the way, was for £14 3s instead of £15 6s, to the plaintiff himself instead of to his solicitor. Of course, this meant that had the plaintiff not been a man of good principle his solicitor might have had what is called a “Buckley’s chance” of recovering his fees.

As you can see, these early uses provide no clue as to who was the inspiration for the phrase. Two explanations are commonly proffered; both are plausible but neither has any evidence connecting them to the phrase.

The first is that it was inspired by William Buckley (1780–1856). Buckley was a transportee to Australia who escaped prison and lived for 32 years among the Aborigines in the South Victoria outback. His chances of survival were slim, but he managed to nonetheless.

The second is that the phrase is a pun on the name of the Melbourne retailer Buckley and Nunn, founded 1851. The pun being that someone had two chances, Buckley’s and none. The retail operation is still in existence, but now owned by and operating under the name of David Jones Pty Limited.

And it could come from a combination of these two, with William Buckley supplying the chance and the retailer supplying the none.

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Sources:

“Diamond Cut Diamond.” The New Zealand Observer and Free Lance, 11.715, 10 September 1892, 15.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. Buckley’s n.

“Ivanhoe Races.” Hay Standard and Advertiser (New South Wales), 27 March 1872, 2.

“The Lady: Chit Chat.” Melbourne Punch. 22 September 1887, 10.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. Buckley’s, n.

“Sporting Life.” Melbourne Punch, 23 February 1888, 11.

“Sporting News. The Daily News (Perth), 21 March 1892, 2.

Photo credit: Commander Keane, 2012, Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

five-oh / twelve

13 June 2020

Five-oh (or five-o) and twelve are two numerical, Black, slang designations for the police. Both appear, at least at first glance, to come from the titles of old U.S. television series: Hawaii Five-O (1968–80, rebooted 2010–present) and Adam-12 (1968–75).

Of the two, five-oh is older and the origin more certain. It appears in print in a 29 August 1983 New York Times article, although it is older in oral use:

At many parks and corners, a detective is called a “D.T.” On the Upper West Side, a “Five-O” refers to a uniformed police officer. The word comes from the television police series “Hawaii Five-O.”

By the time five-oh appears in print, the television series had been off the air for three years but could still be readily seen in syndication. The number in the TV series title comes from Hawaii being the fiftieth state—it had been a state for less than ten years and its place in the union still somewhat novel when the series premiered.

The connection of twelve to the Adam-12 series is more tenuous. The slang term is first documented in a 6 May 2003 submission to Urban Dictionary:

twelve
the police.
aye folk there go twelve right there.

In the case of twelve, the series had been off the air for over twenty-five years, and it wasn’t commonly in syndication, although it perhaps could be seen on retro cable-TV channels. It may have been deliberately coined on the model of five-oh, only picking a different police show. But such deliberate coinages are rarely successful, and it seems likely that the twelve is actually a reference to something else, and the TV-series is just an after-the-fact rationalization by someone familiar with the five-oh designation.

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Sources:

Breslin, Rosemary. “City Teen-Agers Talking Up a ‘Say what?’ Storm.” New York Times, 29 August 1983, B2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. five-oh n., twelve n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2006, s.v. Five-O, n.

Urban Dictionary, 6 May 2003, s.v. twelve.

broad

12 June 2020

Broad is a slang term for a woman. It is sexist and connotes that the woman in question is sexually promiscuous. This sense of the word appears in criminal slang in the early twentieth century. The metaphor underlying the sense is uncertain, although there is an early guess that is plausible.

The adjective broad, meaning wide, is from Proto-Germanic, and this standard sense can be found in Old English as brad. It, for instance, appears in Beowulf, lines 1545–47a, in the fight between Beowulf and Grendel’s Mother:

Ofsæt þa þone selegyst,          ond hyre seax geteah
brad ond brunecg;       wolde hire bearn wrecan
angan eaferan.

(Then she straddled her hall-guest and drew her dagger, broad and bright-edged; she wanted to avenge her child, her only kin.)

The earliest use of broad as a noun meaning woman that I am aware of is by cartoonist Thomas A. “TAD” Dorgan in 1913. The use is cited in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, but I have been unable to locate the exact source, and while the denotation of broad to mean woman is clear, the context and connotations are not clear from the brief citation:

I caught Harry using my phone yesterday and took the message myself—she was some broad too.

The word is defined and given an etymology the next year in Jackson and Hellyer’s 1914 Vocabulary of Criminal Slang:

BROAD, Noun

Current amongst genteel grafters chiefly. A female confederate; a female companion; a woman of loose morals. See “DONY,” “FLUZIE,” “MUFF.” Broad is derived from the far-fetched metaphor of "meal ticket," signifying a female provider for a pimp, from the fanciful correspondence of a meal ticket to a railroad or other ticket, which latter originally was exclusively used by "gonifs" to indicate "broad," or a conductor's hat check. Also a playing card from the deck of fifty-two. A "three-card monte man" is a "BROAD SPIELER"; "Tipping the broads” is riding on a purchased transportation ticket; "Beating the broads" is corrupting the conductor or other collecting functionaire of a transportation line.

The proposal that the use comes from broad meaning ticket is plausible, but unlikely. Even Jackson and Hellyer deem it “far-fetched.” It’s plausible because broad has been used to mean a playing card since the eighteenth century. From George Parker’s Life’s Painter, c. 1790:

Sharps. Men of a contrary nature. This term is applied to sharpers in general, who are continually looking out for flats [i.e., “men who are easily taken in”], in order to them upon the broads, that is cards, or in short, any thing else, from pitch and hustle in Moorfields, to the Pharo table at St. James’s.

A move from playing cards to tickets of various sorts is plausible, although we have little evidence for such use outside of Jackson and Hellyer’s dictionary. So, their record of the term’s use as such may be a local usage peculiar to Portland, Oregon or the Pacific Northwest more widely. (Hellyer was a police detective in Portland, and much of his dictionary is based on his experience.) It’s tempting to treat this origin as authoritative because it appears close to the term’s appearance in print. If it’s older, the thinking goes, it must be closer to what those who coined it thought. But the opposite is usually the case. Later explanations, particularly advanced by those who have studied the entire corpus of evidence, which is growing as more and more old texts are digitized, are more likely to yield better answers.

Another suggestion, again advanced without evidence, is that it a sexually promiscuous woman is broad-minded. A more plausible speculation, but again just a guess, is that women are labeled broad because their hips tend to be broader than those of men.

In short, we don’t really know why this particular use of broad came to be. There are likely to be earlier examples of use to be found. Unfortunately, broad is a difficult word to search for in digital texts. Separating this slang sense from all the other senses of the word is laborious and not easy to automate. Perhaps, as more early examples of use are found, a clear origin will emerge.

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Sources:

Dictionary of Old English: A to I. University of Toronto, 2018, s.v. brad.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. broad n.2.

Jackson, Louis E. and C. R. Hellyer. A Vocabulary of Criminal Slang. 1914.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. broad, adj., n.1, and adv.

Parker, George. Life’s Painter of Variegated Characters in Public and Private Life, second edition. c. 1790. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).