I also got a lot of reader responses to my post on “You’re not the boss of me!” Most of them wrote to tell me that if I had not been so quick to filter the They Might Be Giants song “Boss of Me” out of my Google search, I would have learned that it is the theme song for Malcolm in the Middle, and has been for all five or six seasons of the show. That, they pointed out, probably had a lot to do with the phrase’s increasing popularity.
A good number of respondents also mentioned the movie Boogie Nights, in which porn star Dirk Diggler tells off his producer, saying, “You’re not the boss of me, Jack! You’re not the king of Dirk! I’m the boss of me! I’m the king of me. I’m Dirk Diggler!” (Thanks to Mike Miller and D.G. Judy for the exact quotation.) I actually did see Boogie Nights, and I’m surprised I didn’t notice that line, especially since it seems to have made an impression on so many others. Maybe it even inspired TMBG; Boogie Nights came out in 1997, and “Boss of Me” in 2000, so it’s possible.
Though these two pop culture appearances may have helped popularize boss of me, the strange syntax predates them. A few readers noted that Monica Lewinsky had been widely quoted as saying it. VC reader Michael Gebert notes that Bob and Ray often used the phrase for a couple of recurring characters in their racio show from the 50s to the 70s. And several readers told me about hearing it in their childhood, the earliest being the 1960s.
As for how the phrasing actually came about, there were a couple of hypotheses that a number of readers proposed. Some said they thought it was supposed to imitate the syntax of a child, being as how kids are more apt to say “You’re not the boss of me” than (most) adults are. I don’t buy this one. It leaves unaddressed the question of why this should sound like childish syntax. After all, how many kids have you heard saying things like friend of me, doctor of me, mother of me, etc.? In other words, most kids seem to have possessives with relational nouns other than boss well in hand, so the question is still: What is so special about boss? And anyway, I think you sound equally childish whether you say, “You’re not the boss of me!” or “You’re not my boss!”
Other readers guessed that boss of me was formed on analogy with phrases such as king of England, mayor of the town, chair of the committee, etc. At first I didn’t put much stock in this hypothesis, either, since the of-phrases in these examples are geographic areas, or collective nouns, not singular individuals. However, one reader (whom I’d be happy to credit, but who wishes to remain anonymous) pointed me to the 1979 movie Norma Rae, in which the title character tells an antagonist something like this:
you may be the boss of this town, you may be the boss of this factory, you may be the boss of this shop, but you ain’t the boss of me.
This speaker goes from town to factory to shop until she gets to the smallest location of all, consisting of just one person, herself. If she’d switched from boss of to my boss at the end, it would have ruined the flow, so I can actually see a reason for saying boss of me here, and an actual instance of it being formed by analogy with more natural boss of constructions. So my favorite hypothesis at this point is that the originators of the phrase were drawing a contrast between having authority over some area or group of individuals (family, classroom, etc.) and having authority over them personally; and once coined, the phrase was imitated by other speakers.
Thanks to all the VC readers who took the trouble to send me their comments, on this topic, on “doing the best” , and also on Nuh-uh/(y)uh-huh. I’ll be doing a followup on that last one, too, but it’ll have to be back on my own blog, and after I can get an International Phonetic Alphabet font to display there. And finally, thank you for inviting me back, Eugene; I hope you had as much fun on your vacation as I did here.
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