Tamara asked me a question this evening that I thought would be ridiculously easy to answer.

“Why do English people say ‘Bob’s your uncle’?”

Ah.

Well.

I know perfectly well what it means. I’ve probably been saying it for most of my life.

You explain how to do something, reach the final step and say:

“And Bob’s your uncle.”

Meaning: there you are. Job done. That’s all there is to it.

But Tamara wanted to know why Bob? And whose uncle was he?

And I realised I hadn’t the faintest idea.

There is a story that it comes from British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury — Robert, or “Bob”, Gascoyne-Cecil — appointing his nephew Arthur Balfour to an important government job in 1887.

Bob really was his uncle.

It’s a lovely explanation. Unfortunately, like quite a few lovely explanations, it may not actually be true. The phrase doesn’t seem to turn up in print until decades later, around the 1920s.

So after more than seven decades of speaking English, I’ve discovered that I regularly use a phrase whose origins I can’t satisfactorily explain.

We tried finding a Bosnian equivalent.

“I eto.”

“I gotovo.”

“Eto ti ga.”

They get somewhere near the meaning, but somehow none of them has the wonderful absurdity of announcing that an entirely unknown man called Bob is apparently related to you.

And then, of course, there’s the longer version:

“Bob’s your uncle and Fanny’s your aunt.”

I decided not to attempt explaining that one.

Some things are probably better left untranslated.