Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Loose cannon

 

Having just wrapped up the 8th book in the Silver Rush series and rushed it off to the editor, I'm still awash (so to speak) in nautical slang, all while watching the election returns. I was looking for an idiom that might bridge the two worlds, and fell upon the phrase loose cannon.

Want to guess the etymology of that one?

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From the Online Etymological Dictionary:

[I]n the figurative sense "wildly irresponsible person, potent person or thing freed from usual restraint," by 1896; in the literal sense an object of dread on old warships; the figurative use probably arose from a celebrated scene in a popular late novel by Victor Hugo: 

"You can reason with a bull dog, astonish a bull, fascinate a boa, frighten a tiger, soften a lion; no resource with such a monster as a loose cannon. You cannot kill it, it is dead; and at the same time it lives. It lives with a sinister life which comes from the infinite. It is moved by the ship, which is moved by the sea, which is moved by the wind. This exterminator is a plaything." [Victor Hugo, "Ninety Three," 1874]

Slinging Mud: Rude Nicknames, Scurrilous Slogans, and Insulting Slang from Two Centuries of American Policies by Rosemarie Ostler, credits Theodore Roosevelt with making this phrase popular around 1901. At a dinner one evening at his brother-in-law's house, while speculating on life after his term was up, Roosevelt apparently remarked, "I don't want to be the old cannon loose on the deck in the storm." Ostler also references Victor Hugo's novel Ninety-Three, so I think we'll let the laurels rest with Hugo...

Cannons: dangerous enough when fixed in place, but even worse when loose!
"Three ships offshore firing cannons." Gouache copy of 17th Century Netherlandish painting. http://www.abbottandholder-thelist.co.uk/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=91348813