"son of a sea-cow"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Aficionados of pulp seafarin' yarns were once familiar with the euphemistic
epithet "son of a sea-cook."

Here's a variant. (No OED. Maybe Green has it):

1822 _Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine_ (Sept.) 382: Son of a sea cow, you
are drifting leeward.

1831 Leitch Ritchie _The Romance of History: France_ (N.Y.: Harper) II 165:
Oh, the son of a sea-cow! what has he been saying?

1835 _Army & Navy Chronicle_ (Washington, D.C.) (Oct. 22) 333: We hear of
the son of a sea cow often at sea but have never met with the parent animal.

1865 _Dollar Monthly Magazine_ (July) 82: Get for'ard, you bloody son of a
sea-cow.

1880 _Poultry World_ (Nov.) 326: Come out of there, you son of a sea-cow,
or I'll chaw the heart out of you!

1932 Wilson Mizner & Joseph Jackson _One-Way Passage_ (film):  I'll be a
son of a sea-cow!

1949 Clarence Benham _Diver's Luck_ (Sydney: Angus Robertson) 43: How would
you like to cook pertaters an' then watch another hungry-gutted son of a
sea-cow a scoffin' of 'em?

Undoubtedly the 20th C. exx. were based more on literature than on life.


JL

--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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