It‘s a boy. Sink that ship overthere. 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 wordorigin 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 backto the mid-19th century, and you be the judge. According to this story, the phrase "son of a gun," a mildly pejorativeterm for a man, arose in the days of sailing ships, when the wives ofsailors sometimes accompanied their husbands on long ocean voyages. Asprivacy was scarce aboard these ships, goes the story, if a woman gave birthduring the voyage, the delivery would often take place in the most secludedplace available, which was between the cannons on the ship‘s gun deck. Thechild‘s birth would then noted in the ship‘s log as "a son of a gun." (Acommon variation on this story has the woman being a seafaring prostituteand the conception, not delivery, of the child taking place on the gundeck.) As I said, this story has been popular since the mid-19th century, but inmy view it sports more than its share of problems. Roughly half of thechildren born, for instance, must have been female, yet "daughter of a gun"is nowhere to be found in vernacular English. It is also significant thatno actual documentary evidence, such as a ship‘s log, has ever been offeredin favor of the "gun deck" theory. But a more compelling flaw in the story is that it is simplyunnecessary. "Son of a gun," since its first appearance in the early 18thcentury, has been used as a sanitized form of the derogatory phrase usuallyabbreviated as S.O.B. (or, as Barbara Bush might put it, "son of arhymes-with-witch"). As for why "gun" would be picked as a substitute forthe 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 thefact 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 aeuphemism.
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