Talk:Bob's Your Uncle

This text probably has some useful info, but it's clearly a copyvio of this site. 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) 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. 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 favoritism 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. 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.

--Foot Dragoon 03:56, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

The above text no longer appears in the article, but it does contradict the article, which claims that Balfour is definitely the source. -- Beland 17:20, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
 * I fixed the article. -- Beland 17:25, 14 May 2007 (UTC)