I Hate the Boss of Me My Boss!

Here is something that my brother Glen never said to me while we were growing up:

You’re not the boss of me!

However, he did say this on a number of occasions:

You’re not my boss!

For the past few years, though, I’ve been hearing the first phrasing much more than the second one, and I don’t know why. The of me makes it sound like the speaker is translating something from a language that doesn’t have possessive pronouns. The primary place where I expect to see of-possessive in English is in partitive constructions, as in all/part/some/none/the rest of me. To indicate ordinary possession of some object, a possessive pronoun or ‘s possessive is the usual way to go, as in Neal’s dog or our house.

Of course, my boss is not a case of ordinary possession, since only in the rarest cases does one own one’s boss. It’s a relational noun, which means that a possessive shows who the noun relates to. Even so, boss is the only relational noun I’ve seen where an of-possessive is OK (at least for some speakers). All the other relational nouns I know of show the relation with an ordinary possessive. For example:

• the boss of me / my boss
• *the doctor of me / my doctor
• *the attorney of me / my attorney
• *the father of me / my father (but: father of the bride)
• *the wife of me / my wife
• etc.

These examples hold good at least when the ordinary possessive is pretty short–I’d probably use an of-possessive instead of saying something like the a friend of a guy I used to work with’s boss. (In fact, I’d have to, if I wanted to make it clear whether it was the friend’s boss or the guy’s boss.) So what is so different about boss that it deserves an of-possessive?

I did some Google searching on the phrase the boss of, and here’s what I found out.

1. They Might Be Giants did a song called “Boss of Me” that is mentioned in a lot of websites.

So I had to start over, adding “-giants” to my search. I found that there were hundreds of thousands of hits for my/you/his/her boss, there were at most only a few thousand hits of the corresponding boss of phrase; the most was near 7000, for the boss of me. Aside from that, obvious patterns didn’t really jump out.

But I did notice one pattern after a little more searching: the boss of tends to occur in predicate nominatives–that is, in noun phrases after some form of be, as in You’re not the boss of me. It can also appear as the subject of be, but I’ve seen that only in statements that are identifying who someone’s boss is or isn’t, as in The boss of me is me!

Outside of those two cases, I have yet to see the boss of X replace X’s boss. For example, I got ~600 hits for I love my boss, ~2300 for I hate my boss, and ~290 for my boss is an idiot, but no hits at all for any of these strings when I replaced my boss with the boss of me. However, to really do this kind of search right, what you need is a corpus that’s been annotated with parts of speech and at least a little bit parsed, so that you can ask for the boss of as the subject or direct object of any verb instead of just love or hate or some other specific verb. Since I don’t have access to one of these, I tried the Linguist’s Search Engine, which will annotate and shallowly parse customized Internet corpora, and then search them for you. So far, though, nothing has turned up.