Son of a gun is an exclamation in American and British English. It can be used encouragingly or to compliment, as in "You son of a gun, you did it!"
The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary and Webster's Dictionary both define "son of a gun" in American English as a euphemism for son of a bitch.[1] [2] Encarta Dictionary defines the term in a different way as someone "affectionately or kindly regarded."[3] The term can also be used as an interjection expressing surprise, mild annoyance or disappointment.
The phrase is found in a piece of comic verse from 1726:[4] A 1787 correspondent to The Gentleman's Magazine suggested that the phrase originally meant "a soldier's brat".[5]
The phrase potentially has its origin in a Royal Navy direction that pregnant women aboard smaller naval vessels give birth in the space between the broadside guns, in order to keep the gangways and crew decks clear.[6] Admiral William Henry Smyth wrote in his 1867 book, The Sailor's Word-Book: "Son of a gun, an epithet conveying contempt in a slight degree, and originally applied to boys born afloat, when women were permitted to accompany their husbands to sea; one admiral declared he literally was thus cradled, under the breast of a gun-carriage."[7]
Alternatively, historian Brian Downing proposes that the phrase "son of a gun" originated from feudal knights' disdain for newly developed firearms and those who wielded them.[8] An American urban myth also proposes that the saying originated in a story reported in the October 7, 1864 The American Medical Weekly about a woman impregnated by a bullet that went through a soldier's testicles and into her womb. The story about the woman was a joke written by Legrand G. Capers; some people who read the weekly failed to realize that the story was a joke and reported it as true.[9] This myth was the subject of an episode of the television show MythBusters, in which experiments showed the story implausible.[10]