No Sirree, Bob!

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Oh, hi, Martha.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Chris Milne from Kittery, Maine.

Hi, Chris. Welcome to the show.

Thank you, Grant.

I was listening to some media recently and came across the expression, no siri, Bob, and remembered hearing that as a child and using it and assuming everybody used it and just got to wondering about that expression, how it came about, and how common it is.

Okay, yeah.

And you took that as what, when you heard No Surrey, Bob?

It is a hard no.

A hard no.

As an impolite hard no, or a humorous hard no?

Yeah, not impolite.

Definitely kind of a way to lighten the hard no, perhaps.

Yeah, yeah, that’s it.

Absolutely. I think you’re trying to avoid being offensive. It’s an emphatic way to do it as well. So you want them to understand that you mean it, but you’re trying not to offend. And you can, of course, yes siri, Bob, is the same.

Oh, absolutely.

It might be older than you think. What year would you put on that if you had to put one on it?

Oh, okay.

I think I’ve just blown my chances of catching you out.

It sounds like, it sounds Looney Tunes, but I mean, surely it’s older than that.

Yeah, it’s older.

Go 100 years older than that.

Okay, early 1900s.

1840s.

Holy smokes.

Yeah, yeah, 1840s.

No Siree Bob pops up first, and then Yes Siree Bob is almost immediately used.

And you’ll find that Bob is probably the more interesting part of it.

Yes Siree really is kind of obvious.

The siree is really just an emphatic sir.

And you will find siree on its own without yes or no in front of it.

It’s just very, very emphatic.

Siree in the same way.

But the bob probably is a euphemism for God.

In older slang in the UK and the US, prior to the 1840s, as far back as I think the 18-teens, you could hear people say things like, so help me, bob.

And that Bob, by the way, is sometimes capitalized and sometimes not.

So it’s not necessarily a reference to a specific Robert or a specific person.

Interesting.

But anyway, so to put it all together, what we’re doing here is it’s an emphatic sir.

It’s a way to euphemize God.

It’s a way to be very emphatic and avoid offense.

And that Bob, while at the same time it’s emphatic by invoking the name of God, avoids offending people by not actually using the name of God.

There it is. We’ve changed God to Bob.

Yeah. So it’s like saying by God without saying by God.

Very good. That makes a lot of sense. And in my defense, I watched Looney Tunes when I was a kid and not in the 60s.

It’s funny how influential Looney Tunes is on generation after generation.

Very good. Well, thank you so much.

Yeah, our pleasure.

Thanks for calling, Chris.

Take care.

Of course.

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