What does "please with sugar and knobs on" mean?
What does please with sugar and knobs on mean in the following sentence?
Please, pretty please, pretty please with sugar and knobs on, do not ever look at your monthly/quarterly/annual statements; they only serve to confuse you.
Specifically, what do sugar and knob refer to?
This comes from a comment on Money SE.
It's three different "intensifiers" used together, effectively "Please please please please!"
Pretty as in that was pretty stupid is quite common in the slightly childish/winsome/wheedling entreaty Pretty please?.
With [brass] knobs on is a well-established intensifier (cf with bells on). I've not come across with sugar used in this way, and certainly the conjunction of all three isn't what I'd call a standard idiom, but in context the meaning is obvious.
EDIT: Note that "The same to you with [brass] knobs on!" is (rather dated) British slang, which explains why many people aren't familiar with it. Outside of that specific retort, with knobs on was never particularly common, so for any one under 50 (or not British) I've obviously overstated the case by saying it's a "well-established intensifier". Nevertheless, it is just an intensifier, with no other connection to "pretty" and "with sugar on".
"With sugar on," indicates you are offering something desirable or valuable as an incentive.
"With knobs on," comes from 1920's slang, and meant that something was embellished, for example an iron bedstead with knobs on becomes that bit more special.
The two phrases together are just meant to accentuate the request, as is the repetition of "pretty," - the request becomes special, different, more important.
As the one who perpetrated the phrase that has created such vigorous discussion, let me begin by saying that although I have spoken English for most of my life (even attended and matriculated (O level GCE from Cambridge) from what is called an English-medium school in India), I am not a native speaker of English, and the language that I speak and write is a mishmash of American and British English with a few phrases from Indglish thrown in.
@callithumpian's suggestion "...the original comment was an accidental mash-up of these two..." is dead on target: I mashed up two intensifiers, perhaps accidentally, but more likely because of a failure to do a final proof-reading after editing my comment to fit the length constraint imposed by stackexchange (I deleted a lot of extraneous stuff). The "Please, pretty please, with sugar" and the elided "on top" is from my life in the US and I learned to use it while wheedling my children and grandchildren and their friends. The "knobs on" part is definitely from my reading during my schooldays (fifty years ago!) which was almost exclusively of British authors with the exception of Mark Twain. I might be remembering the phrase from a P. G. Wodehouse novel or story or even from a Billy Bunter story. I have always understood "with knobs on" as meaning embellishment or adornment and not as referring to knobs (or gobs) of butter. I wanted to make my plea to OP Tim to ignore certain pieces of paper more emphatic, and mixed up two phrases in my hurry to do so: knobs on certainly does not seem applicable to sugar -- on top or elsewhere.
I think it is the first time that something I have written has led to a top-ranked hit on Google. Oh, that any of my intentional writings were so fortunate!
See also "Pretty please with sugar on top" .
As you know please is a modifier for making a request polite, and by implication making it more likely to be fulfilled. A child, for example, might take this "magic" quality of please and try to dress up the phrase. Pretty please indicates more urgent pleading. Pretty please with cherries on top is rather abject. Anything desirable "topping" could be suggested here, as one would add to ice cream or pancakes and the like: sugar, syrup, or in this case knobs probably meaning a knob of butter.
"Knobs" is not a common measurement in American English; usually it is a vulgarism for breasts or nipples.