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I’m on a phrase hunt, and coming up more or less empty. Some time back, my colleague Ben Yagoda ran through the various ways in which people acknowledge thanks, and grumblings arose at several of them. But for most of these phrases, there’s some sort of explanation. You’re welcome suggests that the thanker is welcome to whatever favor was done. No worries or No problem suggest that the favor was no big deal and doesn’t require thanks. But what about You bet?
I hear the phrase more and more often—in conversation, on the radio, in films. It’s difficult to place the rise of the phrase as a response to “Thank you.” Printed instances of You bet (capital Y) have risen fivefold in the last 50 years, according to Google Ngrams, and it’s fair to say that colloquial instances have risen even faster. But these could easily be examples of You bet as a strong affirmative:
“Want a Porsche for your birthday?”
“You bet!”
Here, it’s not hard to guess at the etymology. The response is short for You bet your boots or You bet your life, or whatever valuable thing you might have around. In other words, the speaker is inviting the interlocutor to place a sure bet on his agreement to the proposition. The OED cites this “asseverative phrase” as beginning around the middle of the 19th century, in exchanges like P.G. Wodehouse’s “You will order yourself something substantial, marvel-child?” “Bet your life,” said the son and heir tersely.
You bet as a response to Thank you is a bit trickier. If it’s a strong affirmative, it reads something like this:
“Thank you for my birthday Porsche.”
“Yes!”
Granted, other languages have responses that make little to no sense: Bitte schön, for instance, translates as Please pretty. And plenty of bloggers gripe about the rising tide of You bet. But I find no answer as to when we Americans (yes, it’s mostly Americans) started proposing a bet specifically in response to an expression of gratitude. The OED doesn’t list this use. My own random sampling of linguaphiles has produced mostly the guess that You bet here means something like “You can bet on my being there for you.” This may be the best answer, though something in it doesn’t ring true to the usages I hear on media—listen just once to Kai Ryssdal on public radio’s Marketplace—and in my daily life. I’ve even wondered if the phrase could be a corruption of something else, the way that my students now write “from the gecko” when their spell checker doesn’t approve git-go. But I can’t trace a line back to any you’re-welcome-type response that might have evolved into You bet.
So, Lingua Franca community, here’s your first challenge of 2014. Who can locate where, and why, we started using this asseverative phrase as a colloquial version of You’re welcome? First to nail it wins all the bets.
