“you’re not the boss of me.”

Google Hopes to Open a Trove of Little-Seen Books

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Ben Zimmer, executive producer of a Web site and software package called the Visual Thesaurus, was seeking the earliest use of the phrase “you’re not the boss of me.” Using a newspaper database, he had found a reference from 1953.

But while using Google’s book search recently, he found the phrase in a short story contained in “The Church,” a periodical published in 1883 and scanned from the Bodleian Library at Oxford.