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Reader question: Please explain “shot across the bows” in “…but said his real purpose was to send a shot across the bows of all employees.” My comments: First, let me try to complete the sentence for you. Suppose the boss of a fast food restaurant finds out that an employee has taken boxes of napkins home without permission, what does he do? He probably will punish that employee with a small fine, or something like that. Then he will have a meeting with all employees, giving them a warning that all future violations of company policy will be dealt with much more severely. In this situation, the boss might say that in informing everyone of the punishment he has administered, his purpose was not to humiliate that particular employee in front of others, but to warn everyone against similar misconduct. His real purpose, then, is to “send a shot across the bows of all”. Shot across the bows? What shot, and what bows? Well, that “shot” is a cannon shot originally. The bows refer to shoulders, so to speak, of a ship which are shaped in the form of a bow, the weapon for shooting arrows. Bows, plural, refer to both sides of the ship but in this phrase, bow, singular, works just as well. Anyways, according to Phrase.org, this phrase derives from “naval practice of firing a cannon shot across the bows of an opponent’s ship to show them that you are prepared to do battle.” | 
