Gary Brown: Parents have mastered the 'phrase game'
"And Bob's your uncle."
According to a website explanation, that's a British saying, meaning, essentially, "and there you have it" or "that's all there is to it."
"Put the coin in here, press this button, and Bob's your uncle! The coffee is ready," is a sentence suggested by amazingtalker.com.
Well, I've got a lot of British blood in me, and I never heard that saying before my loved one and I discovered it as an answer an online "WordHurdle" game – at solitaired.com – in which you try to work out the letters and words of phrases.
"How did you think of 'Bob's your uncle?"
"It just looked like the words."
"But, you're not British. You're Italian..."
Neither one of us knew what it meant. We had to look it up.
"Peace of cake, an informal expression for something very easy," another website explained. "It's a doodle, a slang expression for something very easy or a cinch. Easy peasy, a childish expression for something very easy."
And Bob's your uncle.
The ironic thing is I never had an uncle named Bob. Maybe that's why so many things don't come easy to me,regardless of how British my background is.
Phrases stick in your mind
Nevertheless, this new saying is stuck in a loop in my mind.
I cannot get "Bob's your uncle" out of my head, any more than I can forget that my dad’s "What's the damage?" whenever the bill came at a restaurant. And I can't stop adding, "and Bob's your uncle," each time I explain something easy to someone, the same way my mom – every time someone said "I see" – added her favorite ending, "said the blind man, but he couldn't see at all."
My mother and father, being parents, had a huge collection of sayings they could repeat, day after day, until they were engrained in their children's minds.
"Like a bull in a China shop" was one of my dad's most frequently used phrases. But, I'll cut him some slack. He did, after all, have three tall and gawky sons.
He also said, "with a cherry on top" a lot. Of course, it usually was said when he was making our family's traditional Sunday night banana splits.
My mom favored "call it a night," because she liked to get her children in bed by 8. And she repeated almost daily that someone in her family had "a lot on his plate," long before I found out that the saying referred to more than just vegetables.
I remember both saying "do as I say and not as I do." Parents apparently were people before they became moms and dads.
Remembering an abundance of phrases
Frankly, playing the "guess the phrase” game each morning has caused me to get an idea of just how many idiomatic phrases we use every day in our speech.
And it surprises me just how familiar we are with them. Guess one word and often the phrase comes to mind.
Figure out "eye" and doubling it up for "seeing eye to eye" seems obvious. Guessing the word "dime" pays off in "a dime a dozen." And if you happen to have "lickety" come to mind when trying to decipher a two-word phrase, is any other word but "split" going to seem probable as an ending?
Still, merely figuring out some of the phrases doesn't do much to explain why they came into use in the first place.
"Raining cats and dogs." Has anyone ever seen it rain those or any other pets?
"Heads will roll." I hope not. At least not mine.
"Knock on wood." Why do people so often hit their own heads when they say this?
"Light at the end of the tunnel." That's a good thing, unless it's headlights coming directly toward you.
"Letting my hair down." Now there's a saying that has become less meaningful with my age.
And now I've got a new one. I've got two new phrases, to be more precise.
The saying "Bob's your uncle" is gender neutral, as it turns out.
"And Fanny's your aunt" is another way of putting it, according to research I did.
If you didn't know this one either, file it under "You Learn Something Every Day That Now You'll Never Forget."
Reach Gary at gary.brown.rep@gmail.com. On Twitter: @gbrownREP.
This article originally appeared on The Alliance Review: Gary Brown says his parents excelled at 'phrase game'
