You must log in or # to comment.
In Australia: yes and it’s commonplace. But like 70% of our media is American so unsurprising.
Shotgun is an America thing, coming from the stagecoach era. The shotgun in question has a shortened barrel for reduced storage footprint.
The BMW R12 has a sidecar mounted with an MG 42 light machine gun. But no-one calls sidecar gunner
That’s like an amazing American showerthought, I never even considered it
That is purely an American thing.
Not saying my family had someone in the passenger seat with a shotgun to protect their batch of white lightning…also not saying they did.
Nope. Canada had stagecoach and shotguns too. So did Mexico. The Sundance Kid owned a bar in Calgary at one point, and worked out at the Bar U ranch near Calgary before that.
n’t.
It’s still relevant. I always hand my passengers a pistol before disembarking.
Years ago I read “shotgun wedding” and thought it was common to see a guy having to marry a girl he fucked while her father was there at the side with a rifle.
Capaz son asi andá a saber…
It means “quick marriage because the bride is pregnant” and that is 100% the origin of the phrase.
Particularly in poorer, rural parts of the USA having a child out of wedlock was incredibly shameful, and the financial burden of a single motherhood was intolerable. So the bride’s family would ensure the man responsible married their daughter … regardless of how he felt about it. Sometimes that meant having a shotgun at the wedding to ensure he didn’t run off.
NL here. “Shotgun” is a concept, though mostly through Pop Culture Osmosis.
hi northernlion i love your videos
Okk
Yes? Ah sorry, misheard
My kids say “Chewbacca!”
thats a stagecoach thing, right?
Yeah it was bench seating so one guy had the reins and the other had a shotgun. Hence the name.
In the time of horse drawn carriages, wouldn’t the rifle be a more common weapon?
Easier to aim a shotgun went bouncing around on the stagecoach, running from bandits.
And the kids have been shouting shotgun from then on.
Gringo explaining a horse carriage: Imagine a gun
its interesting the slang that persists…
“i call getting to shoot people!”
The modern version would be “I call running the Spotify!”
I mean, it’s still America.
I guess the location of the shooting has changed though. it should mean having your desk at the front of the classroom by the teacher’s desk now.
And other shit.
The amount of naval terminology that has stuck around in English is mind boggling.
Ahoj! I’m Czech. We don’t even have any access to sea…
No direct access, but “jump into the Elbe and wait” is still a valid strategy…
… And hope no German bridge crushes on you!
oh I thought it was from the moonshine age, I guess horse buggies make more sense lol
Whenever someone says “Shotgun” I can only think of the drive-by scene in Boyz 'n Da Hood.
The apocryphal story is actually kind of interesting.
Roads and right of way established during the pre-firearm era were that you’d ride on the left, with people going the opposite way on your right. This was so you could use your dominant hand (usually your right) to use a sword to defend yourself.
Roads after firearms were available often established right of way with riding on the right, with oncoming traffic on the left. This is because when you shoulder a firearm on your right shoulder it’s easier to aim left.
Stagecoach drivers would sit in the left seat, with the extra person sitting on the right, holding a shotgun, hence the colloquial term for the front passenger seat.
I have no idea how true this is, but it makes for an interesting story.
I’d been told it was a gangster thing: passenger seat shoots out the window for a drive-by.
I thought it was a US police thing, because the passenger seat is where the shotgun is commonly holstered.
Every American police car I’ve seen has the gun rack in the trunk.
That makes a bit more sense if true. I don’t easily picture 1920s gangsters wielding shotguns for a drive-by.
The correct answer afaik is stagecoach, but tbf Clyde Barrow did use cut down Browning A5s in their robberies. While I don’t have any information on whether or not they were fired from a moving vehicle, it could have happened.
you know, it just never comes up. mostly because i’m over 190cm so there’s no question of where i get to sit when not driving…
I don’t get it
They’re saying, no, it’s not common for other cultures to call it a gun thing. But in a humorous way, by drawing attention to the absurdity of the question.
I’ll try and explain, but let me know if you don’t follow. In the US it’s common to claim the front passenger seat by saying “I call shotgun!” or simply “Shotgun!” The commenter is playing on a now common refrain where Americans use firearms and terminology to describe basic things. As far as I can tell, it’s true. For example: caulk gun, staple gun, nail gun, glue gun, tattoo gun, finger guns, ot phrases like “I’ll think about it before I pull the trigger on it.” Or “Shoot me your email and I’ll get you those photos.”
I don’t know how prolific this type of thing is in other countries though, so I can only assume we Americans arr outliers due to how deeply ingrained guns are in our culture. Hope this clarifies things a bit, let me know if not.
TLDR: Americans describing so many things: “So imagine a gun, but…”
arr
Pirate detected.
Hoist the flag high!
All the things you listed either shoot projectiles and/or have triggers. What else do you call trigger operated projectile launchers? Also Caulk guns legitimately look like old timey machine guns.
Replacing “gun” with “press” for example.
Alternatively, caulker, stapler, nailer, gluer, tattooer, and finger pointers. Fingers also usually don’t launch projectiles I think. It’s just that gun culture is so embedded in your brain you couldn’t think of an alternative.
Note how these are all construction tools, and construction is also usually worked by men there. Yet more traditionally feminine tools don’t get the “gun” additive; most will say spray bottle for example rather than spray gun, even though it also has a trigger (a literal gun-like one in some cases) and shoots out a projectile.
I think press works for Caulk and glue. Stapler is used already for the machine that sits on a desk as opposed to the hand held construction style. Finger pointers is certainly descriptive but when people do “finger guns” the thumb usually mimics the hammer action. What else are they miming? Am I so inundated with gun culture I was unable to think of another use for the thumb?
I think bottles were around before firearms but Staple, nail and Caulk guns were not.
They’re both staplers - one’s just manual and the other isn’t.
Spray bottles did not exist before guns, no.
They both put staples into things but they aren’t really interchangeable functionally. It makes sense to distinguish them depending on the context.
Kartuschenpresse aka cartridge press
This is my perspective as an American looking in. In other languages there may be terminology used for these items that do not reference firearms.
I am curious if there is a language that calls a nail gun not a gun
Amazon and their copycats seem to be calling them ‘nailers’, probably because it’s easier to filter out the constructive guns from destructive, prohibited ones. But Amazon is evil so it’s probably unrelated
To be fair on this one, based on actual functionality ‘air nailer’ or ‘power hammer’ is more accurate than ‘nail gun’’ anyway. Outside of movies, you can’t use it as a gun without enough modification that it’s no longer the same tool.
Tell that to my .22 Ramset.
I like < method of creating force > + hammer above nail gun but to your second point. Nail guns can be deadly without modification. Just close up work. They sell these and others like them at big box stores. This would be, in my favored naming convention, a gunpowder hammer.
Cloueuse pneumatique
Or pneumatic nailer
I don’t think any of those things are referred to as a gun in French. Just essentially “stapler”, “nailer”, “gluer”, ect
I might be biased by the question but I spontaneously thought of “pistolet à clous” as the most common term (which indeed translates to nail gun).
I agree with your other examples though, saying “staple gun” would be weird in french
First bit is true enough, but we call “shotgun” because that was the guy holding the coach gun for bandit defense. Wish I had a pic of mine, but they’re basically a short double-barreled shotgun for warding off robbers and Indians. Coach guns are quickly and easily aimed, powerful at short range, “get the fuck off of me” guns.
The Wild West wasn’t as wild as movies make it out, but you were on your fucking own. LOL, no 911. While you’re driving the coach, best have a man whose job is looking around and blasting raiders.
tl;dr: Calling shotgun means you’re taking the front passenger side in a (historically) defensive role.
Yes, thats part of the why but it’s still odd culturally from the perspective of the rest of the world especially since what you’re describing occurred 100+ years ago and the terminology has likely only persisted because of the US’ gun obsession.
only persisted because
That is a wild stretch of imagination. Loads of things we say, across all countries and languages, persist for centuries after losing their original meanings.
I like the way you explained this.
Bullseye.
The Yankee explaining riding in the passenger seat : imagine a gun
Well, for my world it’s interesting because the passenger seat is just that. But before the evolution of tech and everything else heavily affected travel, the front passenger seat held importance in that the one who sits there can assist in reading a map, adjusting the passenger wing mirror, monitoring the side directly while parking or other tight manoeuvres, emotional support for police stops, handling a drink so the driver can hydrate without endangering anyone, an extra pair of eyes on the less vital areas etc… Now these benefits of a primary passenger are almost nonexistent, as better driver-side controls, digital maps, GPS and TTS, and stricter road safety laws (banning consumption while driving) reduce the need for an assistant driver.
wait, it’s illegal to drink anything while driving in places? when did that happen?
In some place that counts as distracted driving and you can get fined for it.
Now I’d like to know why in France it’s la place du Mort, the seat of the dead…
Because they didn’t have a shotgun.
La place du mort, c’est pas le siège du milieu a l’arrière ?
Ben j’ai toujours pensé que c’est la place du passager.
Ça dépend peut-être de la région.
Chocolatine pain au chocolat hein ^^
While this is probably some bullshit from the horse drawn carriage era, what I’d like to say is that statistically speaking riding shotgun is the most dangerous seat in car crashes, so the saying still works
The shotgun Georg, who uses a small motorbike to jump inside 80,000 cars on highway and bites whoever is in the shotgun seat anually; is an outlier and their victims should be excluded from this survey.
This phrase has confused me so much when I heard it in one of Taylor Swift’s songs.
Then my Texan cousins explained it to me on a visit one day. I was still confused. Now I’ve found out it’s a stage coach thing. Interesting.
