“Son of a gun!” is an interjection with many uses. It can be used as an affectionate term of address when slapping your best friend on the back and calling them a “son of a gun” after a fun night out. You might also shout “son of a gun!” after accidentally slamming your thumb inside the kitchen cabinet. Either way, this is an interesting combination of words, so let’s take a closer look at its roots.
Unfortunately, “son of a gun” is one of those phrases without a 100% certifiable origin story, so we’re left to make some assumptions based on the info we have. One theory is that it’s a rhyming euphemism for the far more crude phrase “son of a b*tch,” (which originated in Shakespeare’s King Lear if you want a bit of literary trivia to excuse your cursing). While this may be true, there’s no direct evidence to back up the euphemism theory, so it’s safer to assume the tie between the phrases is conjecture.
A likelier theory involves British navy life. We begin with a citation from an 1823 slang dictionary by John Badcock, stating “son of a gun” means “a soldier’s bastard [child].” This is supported by an 1867 nautical terms compilation from William Henry Smyth, who wrote the term is “[a]n epithet … originally applied to boys born afloat, when women were permitted to accompany their husbands to sea.” In each of these examples, the “son of a gun” was the literal offspring of a navy or military man.
While we can’t conclusively claim the term was coined by British sailors, those citations do indicate that “son of a gun” was widely used among seafaring Brits before being widely adopted by others. Over time, the idiom lost its inherent connection to the military and is used today as an exclamation, both positive and negative.
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