I saw the wonderful film "World's Fastest Indian" this weekend, in which Anthony Hopkins plays an eccentric motorcycle enthusiast from New Zealand. The phrase "...and Bob's your uncle" came up several times in the dialogue. I wasn't quite sure what it meant exactly but I googled it and found this at Word Detective:




Bob's Your Uncle?

Dear Evan: I'm enclosing an article from a recent New York Magazine about a shop that recently opened in Manhattan called "Bob's Your Uncle," the name of which is also evidently a common British expression. The writer of the article asked "ten different Brits" what the expression means and got ten different answers, ranging from "anything's possible" to "there you are." I'm hoping you can shed a little light on the question, and while you're at it, tell us who "Bob" is. -- K. Mercurio, New York City.

I'm looking at the clipping you sent along and coming to the conclusion that we have far bigger problems around here than figuring out who "Bob" might be. According to the author, "Bob's Your Uncle" (the store) specializes in "unlikely stuff put together in unusual ways" -- specifically, "shirts on lamps, steel mesh on pillows, and pot scrubbers on picture frames." This sounds a great deal like the aftermath of some of the parties I threw in my youth. I never suspected there was a market for that mess. Does Martha Stewart know this is going on?

In any case, it is somewhat disturbing that "ten different Brits" didn't at least know what the phrase means. "Bob's your uncle" is a way of saying "you're all set" or "you've got it made." It's a catch phrase dating back to 1887, when British Prime Minister Robert Cecil (a.k.a. Lord Salisbury) decided to appoint a certain Arthur Balfour to the prestigious and sensitive post of Chief Secretary for Ireland. Not lost on the British public was the fact that Lord Salisbury just happened to be better known to Arthur Balfour as "Uncle Bob." In the resulting furor over what was seen as an act of blatant nepotism, "Bob's your uncle" became a popular sarcastic comment applied to any situation where the outcome was preordained by favoritism. As the scandal faded in public memory, the phrase lost its edge and became just a synonym for "no problem."

World Wide Words places less stock in the nepotism theory:

[Q] From Florence C Goold: “What is the origin and actual meaning of bob’s your uncle?”

[A] This is a catchphrase which seemed to arise out of nowhere and yet has had a long period of fashion and is still going strong. It’s known mainly in Britain and Commonwealth countries, and is really a kind of interjection. It’s used to show how simple it is to do something: “You put the plug in here, press that switch, and Bob’s your uncle!”.

The most attractive theory—albeit suspiciously neat—is that it derives from a prolonged act of political nepotism. The Victorian prime minister, Lord Salisbury (family name Robert Cecil, pronounced ) appointed his rather less than popular nephew Arthur Balfour to a succession of posts. The most controversial, in 1887, was chief secretary of Ireland, a post for which Balfour—despite his intellectual gifts—was considered unsuitable. The Dictionary of National Biography says: “The country saw with something like stupefaction the appointment of the young dilettante to what was at the moment perhaps the most important, certainly the most anxious office in the administration”. As the story goes, the consensus among the irreverent in Britain was that to have Bob as your uncle was a guarantee of success, hence the expression. Since the very word nepotism derives from the Italian word for nephew (from the practice of Italian popes giving preferment to nephews, a euphemism for their bastard sons), the association here seems more than apt.

Actually, Balfour did rather well in the job, confounding his critics and earning the bitter nickname Bloody Balfour from the Irish, which must have quietened the accusations of undue favouritism more than a little (he also rose to be Prime Minister from 1902–5). There is another big problem: the phrase isn’t recorded until 1937, in Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. Mr Partridge suggested it had been in use since the 1890s, but nobody has found an example in print. This is surprising. If public indignation or cynicism against Lord Salisbury’s actions had been great enough to provoke creation of the saying, why didn’t it appear—to take a case—in a satirical magazine of the time such as Punch?

A rather more probable, but less exciting, theory has it that it derives from the slang phrase all is bob, meaning that everything is safe, pleasant or satisfactory. This dates back to the seventeenth century or so (it’s in Captain Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue of 1785). There have been several other slang expressions containing bob, some associated with thievery or gambling, and from the eighteenth century on it was also a common generic name for somebody you didn’t know. Any or all of these might have contributed to its genesis.

(Incidentally, Designers Michael Landon and Steven Wine can shed no light on the phrase's origins, but they've used it as the URL for their artsy light fixture business. They seem to favor the use of feathers in the construction of their lamp shades. *shudder*)

Random House also cites the nepotism of Lord Salisbury as the source of the expression.

Any thoughts? (And I heartily recommend the movie to one and all, not just motorcycle nuts and other gear heads.)

Last edited by Alex Williams; 03/29/06 01:00 PM.