Most of the people I work with are from India. I'll ask them tomorrow. (Yes, I'm in I.T.)
They said that the reason it's an insult is that owls are
sneaky. Nocturnal predators are all regarded as sneaky in most cultures. However, in Anglo-American culture the owl is a symbol of
wisdom: "The wise old owl." The fact that owls are nocturnal predators isn't very important to us, since they're too small to be a threat to our children, or even to our dogs and cats. They eat rats and other vermin, so in fact they perform a valuable service for us!
I'm thinking that the insult concerns the owl's general resemblance to humans: their big forward-looking eyes (which give them binocular vision for depth perception), their human-shaped head that pivots about the vertical, and their general upright stature with their two legs and feet underneath.
This gives them a scholarly appearance as though they are wearing glasses. This may be one of the reasons we regard them as wise.
Yet they are nothing more than an animal.
There are only
six kingdoms of living things on this planet: Animals, Plants, Fungi, Algae, Bacteria, and Archaea.
You are obviously not a weed, a mushroom, a lichen, a germ, or a nanoarchaeum. So you must be
an animal: just like all other mammals, as well as all birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, insects, spiders, cephalopods, starfish, worms, etc.
If you've ever seen an owl in flight- and noticed that you didn't hear much, or anything at all - you know first-hand what that owlish spookiness is like.
Many predatory birds have special kinds of small feathers on the edges of their wings that damp the sound waves they produce when flapping. Owls have the best of these and are the most silent of fliers.
Bats have no feathers and are not as silent in flight as owls. However, they can glide pretty well, which is a very quiet way to move around in the dark.
Not to mention the skills with which they master to fly through the forest and past other obstacles - in what for humans is almost complete darkness.
Unlike most birds, the photoreceptors in owls' eyes are mostly rods rather than cones. Rods are more sensitive to light, providing better nocturnal vision, but they are not sensitive to differences in color. Like most nocturnal animals, owls see almost completely in black and white rather than color. (A few owl species are diurnal, so this doesn't apply to them.)
Most other birds are practically blind at night, but they have more different kinds of daylight photoreceptors than we do (four or more instead of three) so they can see up into the ultraviolet spectrum. This is how they can tell the males from the females when they all look alike to us: their plumage has ultraviolet pigmentation.
Owl is translated as ullu [I think] in those languages. Ullu is a slang, means idiot or asshole [something along those lines].
My Indian friends tell me a better translation would be "scoundrel" or "sneaky bastard."
Son of an owl is not used like son of a bitch, more like 'redneck' - An insult aimed at the intellectual capacity of a person or his close ones, the insult being a slang, not a metaphor.
"Redneck" was originally a regional insult, referring to poor farmers in Appalachia. There are several hypotheses regarding its etyomology. One of the most persuasive relates to the fact that originally many of the people there were Presbyterian immigrants from Scotland, who had worn red kerchiefs in the old country to identify themselves. The Scottish ruling class called these rebels "rednecks." It may also be simply a reference to necks sunburned by long hours working in the fields. After Civil War, when the Appalachian community aligned politically and culturally with the South, Northerners began using the word for all people from the former Confederacy. Today Southerners may use it with pride, e.g., Gretchen Wilson's hit song "Redneck Woman." In the rest of America, "Redneck" has become a derogatory term for anyone (especially people of modest means) with the stererotyped Southern cultural values of racism, sexism, evangelical Christianity and political conservatism, and often carries with it the implication of poor education and drunken brawls.
Well, that's their problem. It doesn't mean that they [bats and owls] are [spooky].
Spookiness is entirely subjective. Something that's spooky to Person A may not be spooky to Person B, and vice versa. I have no problem walking through East Los Angeles at 3am, but I'm scared to be in Mississippi in broad daylight.
