A Monkey with a Gun writes:
> Hey! That’s one I am sure of. The sailors and the marines would socialize on the
> gundeck when they were in port. Sailors and marines being what they are,
> there were quite a few children conceived on the gundeck. Hence: “son of a
> gun”.
>
> Learned that one from Gunny on Mail Call.
Almost certainly not:
In general, etymologies given by sources with no training in etymology are quite likely to be wrong.
Are you saying Gunnery Sergeant Ermey LIED to me!
That’s TREASON! I know you can’t believe everything you read, but it was on television.
Hey! WTF do you think this is, IMHO? Doesn’t anyone have a cite? I can’t believe there are 21 posts with no information yet. I’ll be back.
I had info, samclem.
Well, I had a cite.
That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.
Yeah. I didn’t mean you. I meant not much useful info.
The earliest I can find for the specific taunt “Your mother wears combat boots” is a 1965 newspaper story. That would indicate it might have originated in the prevous 10 or so years.
The earliest I can find for "Your mother wears Army boots is 1963, indicating it was merely an offshoot of the insult.
“Combat boot” only appears as a term in and about 1941, WWII. So the fact that that specific taunt only shows up in and around the 1950’s-1960’s isn’t strange.
I always just thought it meant yo’ mama was poor and clunky and wore boots, but, in thinking, the Army prostitute follower makes more sense in the Yo’ Mama insult tradition.
So, did some basic searching, and nothing concrete. But, an interesting aside, from a nice report on “The Origin’s of Lipstick”:
My bolding, and, again, it’s an aside, but that article was interesting in it’s presentation of an accepted prostitute class. Really seems to me that explaination will have a better historical footprint in the origin of the term, in light of Bosda’s “wears Roman Sandal’s” entry. I hope someone can find better info.
And that helped us with the meaning of the insult how? 
Searching around awhile under different google combos, and some tenuous leads, usually academic and not easily available to my limited ability.
So, this would be a great question for Cecil, or a select minion, to answer, requiring a few calls to them Ivory Tower experts. It has all the great elements for a SD column: Mamas, insults, sex workers, military, um, needs, fashionable footwear questions, and, most important, Warner Bros. cartoon reference. Really like to know the nitty gritty here.
Does anyone have a specific citation showing that it was used in a cartoon? (A specific citation, not “oh, I remember seeing sometime or other”.) It appears that since it didn’t appear in print before 1963, it probably arose in the 1950’s or 1960’s.) The interesting thing is that we have a slew of different meanings for it. It could mean that your mother is poor or a prostitute or a lesbian or a slut or crude. That’s quite a range. Clearly it’s an insult, but there doesn’t seem to be any agreement on what it means. This is sounding more and more like “the whole nine yards.” It’s well known, but it only appeared in print in the 1960’s, and there’s a lot of contradictory stories as to its origin.
I’m curious if the insult ever appeared anywhere prior to a Warner Brother’s cartoon. If it did originate with Warner Brother’s then Cecil or someone’s probably going to have to track down a living relative who might remember what the original joke was, assuming the Warner Brother’s guys didn’t simply think it sounded funny.
Don’t think at all it originated with Warner Bros writers, but that they were damn smart folks who worked with the time they lived in, much more constrained than current oeuvre, and got the creativity in when they could. What would be interesting is to go back to the living left of them and see how they so wonderfully gave us all the good juice we need despite the censorship of their time. I benefitted as a kid from their very sweet code talking. We have such enormous freedom now, in media, but creative folks in mid- last-century had to be very constrained. Their minds were not. Imagine that.
I also found a 1965 reference, in an academic journal, no less!
The article is Millicent Ayoub and Stephen Barnett, “Ritualized Verbal Insult in White High School Culture ,” Journal of American Folklore, vol. 78, no. 310 (October 1965), pp. 337-344.
The authors studied “middle and upper class whites in a prosperous southwestern Ohio town,” choosing the sophomore class at the local high school.
Here’s what they said about “Mother-Sounds”:
The fact that the authors used “Your mother wears combat boots” as the example here suggests that the term was common enough for it to be a part of most readers’ consciousness.
That was always my understanding, too. Nothing about prostitution. Don’t know if it predates Warner, though.
levdrakon writes:
> I’m curious if the insult ever appeared anywhere prior to a Warner Brother’s
> cartoon.
I still want to hear a citation of a specific Warner Brother’s cartoon.
your mother wears army boots is a US exclamatory c.p. – at first, i.e. during WW2, very derisive, then jocularly derisive. An occ[asional] var[iant]: your sister wears army shoes, of which Norris M. Davidson, 1969, has written. ‘I dimly remember having heard some nineteen or twenty years ago. It must be a catch phrase, as it makes no sense.’ R[obert] C[laiborne], 1978, comments, ‘like your fadder’s mustache, (to which it was a frequent counter), usually spoken with a heavy Brooklyn accent, approximating ya mudda weahs ahmy boots!’; and A[nthony] B[rown], 1979, adds the variants shoes for boots; your mother drives a tank or eats K rations or works in a dime store or ah, yer mother wears cotton drawers (the ah may precede the other forms also). ‘All derisive, of course; there are many other variants’.
From A Dictionary of Catch Phrases, Second Edition (1985) by Eric Partridge & Paul Beale
I can’t give a specific cite, but I have a vivid memory of Bugs Bunny saying it at least once or twice circa WWII.
I ran across references to both Bugs and Daffy using the line. Daffy was supposed to have said it to Porky Pig in a skit where Daffy was playing the Pied Piper to Porky’s Mayor of Hamelin, but the specific cite wasn’t given.
As far as I can figure out, that description doesn’t match any Warner Brothers cartoon. There’s a 1939 cartoon called “Pied Piper Porky” in which Porky Pig is the Pied Piper, but Daffy Duck isn’t in it. There’s a 1961 cartoon called “The Pied Piper of Guadalupe” which is even less like the cartoon you describe.
Does anyone have a specific citation for this phrase from a Warner Brothers cartoon? Even the slang dictionary definition quoted isn’t really a citation. It was published in 1985, and it quotes someone in 1969 saying that he vaguely remembers it being said around 1949 or 1950. On Googling, I find various people claiming that it was said by Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck, but no one gives an exact citation. Some of these people remember it being spoken with a Brooklyn accent.
Yes, yes, so do I! “Ahhh, ya muddah wears ahmy boots.” I remember it clearly. Bugs was not always Warner, isn’t that right? There was Merry Melodies and Loony Tunes. Which one belonged to Warner and during which time period?
Note spelling.
Both were always associated with Warners, even if Warners didn’t always own them outright.
The first cartoon with the character using the name Bugs Bunny was A Wild Hare in 1940. The two series were more or less interchangeable, but Bugs eventualy became associated with Merrie Melodies.