Talk:Son of a gun

message: This looks more like a definition of a slang term than an encyclopedia entry, so I think this belongs in Wiktionary. LudwigVan 06:52, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Dictionary

message: wow this article is complete bullshit, awesome
* Yeah. Wikipedia loves folk etymologies. --Tysto (talk) 01:29, 2 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: BS

message: An alternative explanation, first heard in Hong Kong from British friends, was that the term derived from pre-modern warships - where sailors had their hammocks strung among the broadside cannons.  Children who were the product of these sailors [whether conceived on board in the sailor's living quarters - 'at the guns' - or on land] were bastards and never knew their fathers.  Thus it was an expletive commenting on the person's birth and only tangentially on the nature of the person's mother [rather than 'son of a bitch/dog'.]
:Then of course you have the old story of a bullet flying through a testicle and into a woman's uterus, impregnating her. Perhaps this is younger?
:Anyway we never hear about 'daughters of a gun'.Can anyone explain this?
:: Son of a gun rhymes. Daughter of a gun doesn't. M0ffx 20:58, 2 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Alternate possible origination 

message: This article is exemplatory of how bad wikipedia is. Never use wikipedia except for rough information.
One unconfirmed fable says the meaning of son of a gun comes from American Civil War times, when a bullet passed through a soldier's scrotum, passing through him into a woman nearby, and lodged into the woman's ovaries, depositing the sperm, thus impregnating her and bestowing on her unborn child the phrase of "son of a gun". The story's origin is a facetious article in an 1874 medical journal[3]; 
NPOV. First, there are written records proving the existance of said jornal, and other records proving the impossibility of the situation, what is unconfirmed? Also, "unconfirmed fable" is an oxymoron. "Scoopes" is not an acceptable source, it is entirely biased and unscientific anlysis of the situation, just regurgitated from other sources (brings in mind a certain website). —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 131.247.240.122 (talk) 05:14, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  yeah... no 

message: "Son of a gun" is a simple rhyming euphemism for "son of a bitch", the gun deck-hypothesis is a classic, but still wrong.
http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/site/comments/son_of_a_gun/
Maybe someone would like to rewrite the article. Maikel (talk) 20:02, 1 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Nothing to do with gun decks

message: I've removed the following section as both inadequately sourced, and a logical nonsense. Bringing it here in case thee is disagreement:
My reasons for removing this are:
*Inadequate sourcing - the only sources in the paragraph are a blog which fails WP:RS, and a second blog rebutting the first blog (which also fails WP:RS). The last two sentences are essential for the overall etymological claim to make any sense, but have no sources at all. By comparison the remaining etymology (about births in spaces between broadside guns) is sourced to an academic text written by Kemp in his role as Head of History at Admiralty, and supported by a primary source in the form of Smyth's wordbook. The Downing claim re feudal knights is also reliably sourced.
*Logical inconsistency - do we seriously imagine that prostitutes, falling pregnant to British sailors in foreign ports, then queued up at Admiralty House to legitimise the birth of their child and have thgem nominally recorded as being the offspring of sailors? Do we think that captains of RN vessels maintained a log of the children of sailors aboard, where those children were born on land in foreign ports? Do we have any evidence that gunners mates were recorded anywhere as being the nominal parent for the bastards of ordinary seamen? Do we think gunner's mates are even "the senior non-commissioned officer" aboard any vessel (and not, say the sailing master or any of the midshipmen who outranked gunners mates everywhere)? Apologies for the slight sarcasm in these questions, but no single element of this claim stacks up.
Happy to discuss if anyone disagrees with this removal. But per the above, and the previous talkpage threads on this page, this second etymology seems to be poorly sourced nonsense. Articles should be comprehensive, but not the point of being simply wrong. On the basis of sourcing alone, I don't believe the above blog-sourced and illogical claim should be placed in the article alongside two alternatives each on reliable secondary sources. -- Euryalus (talk) 06:13, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Unreliable claim removed

message: This is copied from Urban Dictionary. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=son%20of%20a%20gun Puppyluv7975 (talk) 21:28, 16 July 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Plagiarism