All in the how you say it

Have you ever been in one of those impossible exchanges with a spouse or a lover where, when all the rational arguments have gone your way, you are trumped with those final words: “Yes, but it is not what you said. It is the way you said it!” It is very much the same with the expression you son of a gun!

It all depends on factors like tone and context. It could imply anything from one of those ultimate insults like you are the son of a bitch or whore, or a compliment for having done extremely well, pulling off something quite magnificent or even having achieved a miracle.

Like so often is the case with expressions whose origins could stretch back over centuries, the parentage of this expression is clouded in obscurity and even the subject of legend.

An article in Wikipedia tells us that “it is claimed that in British naval slang this term refers to a child of questionable parentage conceived on the gun deck, hence ‘son of a gun.’ However, the term possibly predates this claimed origin and Snopes.com lists it as being part of the English lexicon since at least 1708.”

That 1708 printed reference to the expression comes from The British Apollo No. 43 of that year.

It would also seem that the meaning of the phrase changed from time to time depending on the context of the time. In William Henry Smyth’s The Sailors Word-Book, published in 1867 he describes it as “an epithet conveying contempt in a slight degree, and originally applied to boys born afloat, when women were permitted to accompany their husbands at sea; one admiral declared thata boy was thus literally cradled under the breast of a gun-carriage.”

Most sources accept that the expression comes from naval tradition and from the fact that the British navy used to allow women – both wives and sometimes even prostitutes – to join sailors on voyages.

At some point, it is said, feudal knight used the expression to show their disdain for the then newly developed firearms.

When the upheaval of World War I came around it was used to indicate the illegitimate offspring of servicemen.

During the American Civil War a humorous article in an edition of The American Medical Weekly in November 1874 gave birth to a legend which was repeated later by some sources as the truth. According to this legend there was almost literally an example of a son of a gun.

The story goes that a woman was impregnated in May 1863 by the sperm on a bullet that ricocheted off the bone of a soldier shot in the leg The shot took off his left testicle and entered the reproductive tract of a young virgin more than 30 metres away. Nine months later she gave birth to a healthy baby!

It just so happens, the legend has it, that the doctor who delivered her baby was the same one who attended to her and the wounded soldier nine months earlier.

The young man, when informed what had happened, rushed off to shoulder the responsibility and married the girl.

Now how is that for new meaning to the term “a shotgun marriage”!