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It‘s a boy. Sink that ship over
there.
Dear Word Detective: I recently found myself using the hoary expression
"son of a gun" and wondered if you could tell me anything about its origins.
-- Eric Patterson, Tokyo, Japan.
"Son of a gun" is indeed a "hoary" (meaning "gray or white with age")
phrase, but it‘s still notable for inspiring one of the more colorful word
origin stories. As is often the case with such stories, "more colorful"
may well amount to "nonsense," but I‘ll lay out the story, which dates back
to the mid-19th century, and you be the judge.
According to this story, the phrase "son of a gun," a mildly pejorative
term for a man, arose in the days of sailing ships, when the wives of
sailors sometimes accompanied their husbands on long ocean voyages. As
privacy was scarce aboard these ships, goes the story, if a woman gave birth
during the voyage, the delivery would often take place in the most secluded
place available, which was between the cannons on the ship‘s gun deck. The
child‘s birth would then noted in the ship‘s log as "a son of a gun." (A
common variation on this story has the woman being a seafaring prostitute
and the conception, not delivery, of the child taking place on the gun
deck.)
As I said, this story has been popular since the mid-19th century, but in
my view it sports more than its share of problems. Roughly half of the
children born, for instance, must have been female, yet "daughter of a gun"
is nowhere to be found in vernacular English. It is also significant that
no actual documentary evidence, such as a ship‘s log, has ever been offered
in favor of the "gun deck" theory.
But a more compelling flaw in the story is that it is simply
unnecessary. "Son of a gun," since its first appearance in the early 18th
century, has been used as a sanitized form of the derogatory phrase usually
abbreviated as S.O.B. (or, as Barbara Bush might put it, "son of a
rhymes-with-witch"). As for why "gun" would be picked as a substitute for
the taboo word, simple: it rhymes. Other sanitized forms of S.O.B. have,
in the past, included "son of a bachelor" and "son of a biscuit," but the
fact that "son of a gun" rhymes has made it popular enough (and, over time,
inoffensive enough) to be used by people who don‘t even know they‘re using a
euphemism.
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