The phrase son of a b How do you write it? is it like this: sonofab#$! Or like this son-of- b#$! Of son of a b#$! I did not know if it was ok to type out the word
I'd space it out. Son of a bitch. If I couldn't write the real words, I'd write something else, unless I was writing a comic book. The symbols seem silly, to me (like it's somehow the letters that are offensive?)
Just like that; son of a bitch. To substitute the words for symbols or censorship comes across as a bit childish and disconnecting. If you don't want to offend any readers with the words, choose other words. In my opinion you should never censor any words you use, but just think about which words you choose. Or like @Shadowfax said, put them together and make a single word of it. Son of a bitch isn't that obscene nowadays.
If a character is amazed by what he has just witnessed he could draw it out - son of a bitch ( how to write that and indicate the drawn out timing of it is another question). Or she might just shake her head in disbelief and abbreviate to sonofa. If the speaking character is just throwing in the term for effect then sonofabitch works for me. It's interesting that the term no longer has vitriolic intent. In common speech it can be used in a derogatory fashion or in a fashion that denotes praise. That sonofabitch cut in the line, or, that sonofabitch has a mean fastball. And the mother's reputation never seems to be the issue anymore when the phrase is thrown about, it's lost it's vulgarity. etymology 1707 as a direct phrase, but implied much earlier, and Old Norse had bikkju-sonr. Abbreviated form SOB from 1918; form sumbitch attested in writing by 1969. Abide þou þef malicious! Biche-sone þou drawest amis þou schalt abigge it ywis! ["Of Arthour & of Merlin," c. 1330] "Probably the most common American vulgarity from about the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth" [Rawson]. Our maid-of-all-work in [the indecency department] is son-of-a-bitch, which seems as pale and ineffectual to a Slav or a Latin as fudge does to us. There is simply no lift in it, no shock, no sis-boom-ah. The dumbest policeman in Palermo thinks of a dozen better ones between breakfast and the noon whistle. [H.L. Mencken, "The American Language," 4th ed., 1936, p.317-8] Elsewhere, complaining of the tepidity of the American vocabulary of profanity, Mencken writes that the toned-down form son-of-a-gun "is so lacking in punch that the Italians among us have borrowed it as a satirical name for an American: la sanemagogna is what they call him, and by it they indicate their contempt for his backwardness in the art (profanity) that is one of their great glories." It was in 1934 also that the New York Daily News, with commendable frankness, in reporting a hearing in Washington at which Senator Huey P. Long featured, forsook the old-time dashes and abbreviations and printed the complete epithet "son of a bitch." [Stanley Walker, "City Editor," 1934]
