Something described as ‘like kissing your sister’ has the outward form of a pleasure but none of the thrill: a kiss, yes, but a dutiful family peck rather than anything to get excited about. In America the phrase is above all a sporting one. A tie, a drawn contest in which neither side wins or loses, is the classic case: you didn’t lose, but you have nothing to celebrate either, and the whole thing feels faintly pointless.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘like kissing your sister’?
The phrase is American and, although it is now welded to sport, it began as a general-purpose way of saying that something delivers the form of an experience without the substance. The earliest example found so far is from the Postville Graphic, an Iowa newspaper, in June 1892: “Reading a typewritten letter from your sweetheart is like kissing your sister.” By 1918 the American Druggist and Pharmaceutical Record was applying it to soft drinks, the implication being that a drink with no alcohol in it was a kiss with no romance in it.
American football adopted it after the Second World War. In December 1946 Edgar ‘Rip’ Miller, a Navy athletics official, was quoted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette saying of a tie that it was “just like kissing your sister with your sweetheart standing by”. In December 1949 the Louisville Courier-Journal credited Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant, then coaching Kentucky, with the observation that a tie ball game “is like kissing your own sister”, since you haven’t accomplished much.
The man the line is usually pinned on, though, is Eddie Erdelatz, the Navy head coach. After Navy and Duke ground out a 0-0 tie in November 1953, Erdelatz was asked what he made of it and replied “It’s like kissing your sister”. The remark was reported in the Washington Post that week and travelled widely, which is why he so often gets sole credit despite being at least the third football man on record with it. Later coaches kept it in circulation, among them Jim Owens of Washington, quoted in Time magazine in 1968, and like ‘the whole nine yards’ it now attracts confident attributions to whichever coach a writer heard say it first.
The best-known later build, “If a tie is like kissing your sister, losing is like kissing your grandmother with her teeth out”, is routinely attributed to the baseball player George Brett. None of the quotation sites that carry it supplies a date or an original source, so that attribution is best treated as unverified.